Intents and Purposes: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Improvisation 0472131303, 9780472131303

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Intents and Purposes

Intents and Purposes Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Improvisation

Eric Lewis

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2019 by Eric Lewis All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper First published April 2019 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Lewis, Eric, 1961–­author. Title: Intents and purposes : philosophy and the aesthetics of improvisation / Eric Lewis. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018056744 (print) | LCCN 2018058611 (ebook) | ISBN 9780472125081 (E-­book) | ISBN 9780472131303 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Improvisation (Music)—­Philosophy. | Music—­Philosophy and aesthetics. Classification: LCC ML3800 (ebook) | LCC ML3800 .L663 2019 (print) | DDC 781.3/6117—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056744

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Why an Ontology of Jazz?  1

1 What Does the Law Hear? James Newton and the Beastie Boys  35



2 Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation: From Machines to the Imaginary  57



3 It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: Work Completion in Improvised Music  103



4 Paris, 1969: Musical Understanding, Genres, and Aesthetic Denseness  139



5 My Favorite Things: Performance, Paraphrase, and Representation  213

Works Cited 257 Index  263

Preface

This book began as an extended critique of the dominant theories of the ontology of music from the analytic philosophical tradition, drawing on improvised music as a source of the critique. I wanted to show that much improvisatory music could not be accounted for by this family of theories, and that consideration of improvised music also suggested problems with these accounts internal to them. After writing some 500 pages on this topic, I realized that I was guilty of something akin, as I argue below, to what is wrong with much of the study of improvisation. That is, I was using improvisations as counterexamples to theories concerned with European art music; I was theorizing improvisation as a purely critical tool. Just as the broad study of music tends to treat improvisation as a deviation from composition, as an alternative to the well-­studied practice of composition, I was treating improvisation philosophically in the same way. I needed to use improvisations as exemplary of a practice with its own theories of what it is or may be, if improvisational studies were to avoid being mired in the theoretical and discursive hegemony of composition. I began to see that instead of showing how improvised musics that have emerged from African diasporic musical traditions problematize ontologies of music, and their related aesthetics created to account for Western art music practices, it would be both more interesting and ultimately valuable to develop the ontological and aesthetic implications of this Afrological tradition in and of itself, and to demonstrate where it differs from that better-­studied tradition focused on Western art music. I will employ the terms “Afrological” and “Eurological” throughout this manuscript, as originally coined by George Lewis in his highly influential article, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,”1 to pick out a set 1.  Originally published in Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91–­122, republished, with an addendum, in The Other Side of Nowhere.

viii  •  Preface

of attitudes, characteristics, and practices associated with African diasporic art—­particularly art grounded in the improvisatory, which, crucially, both suggests and includes a distinctive aesthetics, and can be seen to differ from a “Eurological” perspective toward improvisatory art practices. For Lewis, Afrological improvisation foregrounds history and memory and emphasizes “not only form and technique but individual life choices as well as cultural, ethnic, and personal location.”2 He talks about how Afrological improvisations suggest the internalizing of alternative value systems and welcome “agency, social necessity, personality, and difference.”3 In a concise passage, Lewis states, “This emphasis on personal narrative is a clear sign of the strong influence of the Afrological on improvised music.”4 Lewis’s distinction opened up for me conceptual space to examine what happens when these distinct ontologies, and their associated differing aesthetics, clash, either in legal courts or courts of public opinion. Both are examined in the chapters that follow. I also decided to move from writing a highly technical philosophical work toward one more grounded and powered by case studies of particular recordings and performances, and the discourses surrounding them. One result, I hope, is a book of interest to a wider audience than it would otherwise be, and one that seeks to explain and understand more than criticize. This shift was powered by some observations I made about my own teaching and listening practices. I would regularly lecture concerning John Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things.” When I turned particularly to his later performances, students familiar with standard philosophical accounts of the relationship of musical works to their performances based on Western classical music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would often deny that these were performances of “My Favorite Things” at all. They may have enjoyed them (although often they did not), but they would insist that these were not performances—­that their relationship to the song, the musical work “My Favorite Things,” was not that of a performance of it. I found (and continue to find) this to be an odd response—­how could they hear what I take to be wonderfully rich and aesthetically exciting performances as not being performances at all? And stranger still, how could they conclude, seemingly cavalierly, and contrary to accepted discourse (let alone liner notes, and Coltrane’s own account of what he was doing), that 2.  Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 149. 3.  Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 150. 4.  Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 149–­50.

Preface  • ix

these were not performances, invoking instead a host of seemingly new, and often concocted, relations? The second observation was this—­when lecturing on the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I would regularly find students telling me that they “got” what I was talking about, but still could not understand or appreciate the music. Then one day I showed them a video of an Art Ensemble performance, and they all sat in rapt attention, and afterwards claimed, almost to a student, that they now “got it.” What was it about the performativity, viewing the bodies making music, which contributed to their musical understanding? What is it that they claimed now “to get”? The third observation was more personal. My family would often return home while I would be playing Afrological improvised music rather loudly, and exclaim, “Turn off that noise!” This they meant literally—­they did not hear music, only noise. What accounted for this difference in hearing, such that they could not hear the music in the sounds? What modes of listening were they employing such that the musicality of what I was playing was inaccessible to them? What follows suggests answers to these questions, or at least places to look for such answers. From the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, through participants in the Harlem Renaissance, to Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and the works of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (among many others), there has emerged since the turn of the twentieth century critical writing concerning what can be called an African-­American or an Afrological aesthetics. Its features have been described, theorized, contested, modified, and scrutinized to the point where we can now pick out the characteristics of such an aesthetic as easily as we may debate it details (double-­voicedness, use of signifyin’, emphasis on the voice, the importance of an individual sound, and so on). Important works on Afrological aesthetics have been written, many of them drawing our attention to the ways in which such an aesthetics both bears many of the hallmarks of the general tendencies of aesthetic theories that emerged out of European modernism, and crucially, the many ways in which such an aesthetics, and so the artworks created with such an aesthetics in mind, diverge from the expectations and norms of European aesthetics.5 Much work still needs to be done to foreground the distinct and distinctive features of an Afrological aesthetics, let alone to map its assorted versions, 5.  See, for example, Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture; Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music; LeRoi Jones, Blues People; Graham Lock, Blutopia; Fred Moten, In the Break; Scott Saul, Jazz and the Making of the Sixties; Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies. Most recently see Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.

x  •  Preface

movements, and microhistories (we need to avoid essentializing Afrological aesthetics as much as we need to avoid essentializing race more generally). Yet enough critical attention, from a sensitive and nonadversarial perspective, has finally been given to Afrological aesthetics that we can now fruitfully investigate something that has been rather understudied—­namely how an Afrological aesthetics may both throw into question some of the basic philosophical assumptions of European aesthetics, and suggest solutions to long-­standing aesthetic puzzles emerging out of the European tradition. That is to say, once we have identified the unique and characteristic features of Afrological aesthetics (or at least some of these features for certain strands of the Afrological), we can investigate how such an aesthetics may suggest both problems with European philosophical aesthetics, and solutions to problems internal to such aesthetic investigations. This is what I undertake in what follows. I want to demonstrate how particular Afrological musical practices can be seen to both problematize five sets of issues in the ontology and aesthetics of music as commonly conceived in Western aesthetics, and suggest novel solutions to them:

1. What is a musical work? Where does originality in musical works lie? 2. What is a musical agent or performer? How does agency function in the production and reception of music? 3. What aesthetically relevant properties do musical works have, and why? 4. What is a musical genre? How do genre categories operate and enter into evaluative discourses? What is their function? 5. What is a performance, what is its relationship to musical works? What is an improvisation?

While these questions overlap with each other in varied ways, they will, in this order, be the focus of the five chapters to follow. I address each via case studies. Chapter One focuses on a lawsuit brought by James Newton against the Beastie Boys, concerning the Beastie Boys’s unlicensed use of part of a composition by Newton. Chapter Two considers the improvising software system designed by George Lewis entitled Voyager. Chapter Three considers the history of performances of “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane. Chapter Four considers a series of recordings by members of the AACM,6 focusing on the album Blasé by Archie Shepp, and Mes6.  The Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians, based since the late 1960s in Chicago, with an associated chapter in New York City.

Preface  • xi

sage to Our Folks, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Chapter Five returns to John Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things,” considering them as general examples for developing a theory of improvised work performance. These questions are all ontological at their root. Chapter One considers that most ubiquitous, yet contested, musical entity, the musical work. Chapter Two considers under what conditions musical entities are created. Chapter Three examines what properties musical works have and why. Chapter Four considers the function of musical genres as ontological categories. The final chapter develops a general metaphysics of the relationship of works to performances. Yet issues ontological and aesthetic bleed into each other, since one’s ontological commitments with respect to music inform one’s aesthetic judgments, and vice versa. And so these ontological inquiries are conducted from the perspective of an Afrological aesthetics. I hope to show how:

1. An Afrological notion of the musical work can make better sense of highly improvised musical practices than those created to account for composed music. 2. Afrological accounts of musical agency can help make sense of the status of performers and musical expression, particularly in improvised contexts. 3. Afrological accounts of work-­completion can account for and explain the changing nature of musical works, and the role performance plays in this changing nature. 4. Afrological music both problematizes what a musical genre is and helps explain their highly contested status. 5. Afrological aesthetics suggests an alternative to the standard accounts of the relationship of performances to works.

We will also see the damage that can be done when approaching Afrological musics from the theoretical perspective of a Western aesthetics and its ontology, damage that not only yields a lack of understanding and (aesthetic) appreciation, but can have pernicious political and social results.

Acknowledgments

When I started writing this book in earnest, in the fall of 2006, I had already accrued a large number of individuals to thank, and that list only grew longer as the years passed, and the book morphed, at times with difficulty, into its present form. My work has been supported by assorted grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for which I am grateful. Ajay Heble, with whom I have worked closely for many years, first as part of the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project, and then in the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, has been a constant source of inspiration and a role model for how one can be a responsible scholar, artist, and activist. Although I am sure he has no recollection of it, very early on, during a walk across the University of Guelph campus, George Lewis gave me some advice I needed about working on these topics—­advice that I constantly remind myself of. Of course his scholarship and artistry (let alone his generosity of spirit and intellect) have also inspired. Two other models of engaged and responsible scholarship influenced me greatly, Daniel Fischlin and Ellen Waterman—­ wonderful improvisers, scholars, and people! My colleagues at McGill, Lisa Barg, David Brackett, Will Straw, and Jonathan Sterne, have been generous with their time, wisdom, and friendship. I owe special thanks to my editor, Mary Francis, for both her initial enthusiasm for the manuscript and the care and speed with which she shepherded it through the editorial process. The wider community of scholars of improvisational studies are, almost to a person, warm, inviting, engaged, and helpful. One reason this book has taken so long to be completed (and, as Chapter Three will argue—­is a work ever really completed?) is how much I learn every time I engage with any one of these scholars. For the past decade or so I have nominally led a biweekly improvisational studies reading group for a highly interdis-

xiv  •  Acknowledgments

ciplinary and learned rotating group of graduate students. They manage to make me feel intellectually young again, and many of their thoughts and suggestions are woven into this book. The whole manuscript was read by the fine young philosopher David Collins, who not only cleaned up what was rather a mess, but made a great number of substantive suggestions and improvements. Many of these I note in footnotes, but I am very grateful to him for his patience, care, and good sense. An even more advanced version of the manuscript was given a full “once-­over” by Rachel Collins, who saved me from many an error and omission. I have had the opportunity to work with a number of musician-­scholars whose thoughts and practices inform this book and in many cases are the subjects of various sections and chapters. These include George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Pauline Oliveros, and Bill Dixon. Most of my thoughts concerning improvised music are colored by my personal experiences as an improviser. The community of free-­improvisers is as welcoming a community as any I have encountered. I learn something every time I improvise with others, but it is worth picking out Joe McPhee, Matana Roberts, Lori Freedman, Terry Amar, Michael Bonneau, Peter Burton, Marielle Groven, Nicholas Caloia, Yves Charuest, Scott Thompson, and Joanne Hétu as having particularly influenced me. Pauline Oliveros has stretched my ears as much as anyone; if I can listen at all, it is due to her. Her unexpected passing on Thanksgiving Day, 2016, was a loss to us all, and the loss of someone who truly embodied the fusion of the ontological, aesthetic, and political via improvisation. The members of the Athens (Greece)–­based new media arts collective, Medea Electronique, have been a source of inspiration for many years. My collaborative work with them has been essential to my seeing affinities between artistic and social forms of improvisation. Many, many years ago, my friend Marc Jacoby glared at me and exclaimed, “You are playing drums!”—­my first foray into collective improvisation. His thoughts on improvised music’s place in our creative lives continue to resonate. My development as an improviser, and as a scholar of improvisation, has been aided in ways varied, deep, and profound by my friendship with John Heward, who paints like an improviser, and improvises like a painter. He cannot possibly be aware of the depth of my gratitude. This book would be dedicated to him if I did not think he would find it too much talk, and not enough heart.

Introduction

Why an Ontology of Jazz? Improvisation is more a notational than a philosophical challenge to traditional [musical] directions. —­David Cope, New Directions in Music “You bring race into everything, even music” “It is in everything,” said Simple. —­Langston Hughes, “Bop,” The Best of Simple What excites me about jazz are the political possibilities. . . . I think that we really have to learn what it means to not only envision, but to engage in the practice of freedom. —­Angela Davis, “Jazz and Race: Black, White and Beyond”

Entering the club bristling with excitement, having heard much about the John Coltrane quartet, you can’t help but notice the cramped quarters and the rickety furnishings. The stage, if you can call it that, barely has room for the drum kit and the upright piano, which appears to have seen better days. Sitting down at a small table as the lights darken, you hear the cash register continue to ring, and some patrons at the bar seem rather oblivious to the fact that the music is about to begin. The band shuffles onto the stage, and the bass player Jimmy Garrison begins a lengthy solo. After a good fifteen minutes McCoy Tyner begins comping odd block chords on the piano, while Elvin Jones on drums plays polyrhythmic riffs and John Coltrane puts the soprano sax to his mouth and starts to blow. Commencing in the middle register, and at a medium pace, he soon makes an upward run and all sonic hell breaks loose. For the next forty minutes you witness a barrage of sounds, the musicians clearly straining in response to each other. When

2  •  in t en ts a n d p u r p o se s

it ends you, like the band, are drained, but also elated. The person sitting next to you comments: “That was one of the better versions I have heard of ‘My Favorite Things.’” Knowing that Coltrane was famous for playing this Broadway tune, you do recall hearing brief passages in what was just played that sounded a bit like parts of “My Favorite Things,” but you wonder, “Was that a performance of ‘My Favorite Things’?” Recalling that after the piece Coltrane did come to the mic and say, “Thank you, that was ‘My Favorite Things,’ we will take a short break now,” you are puzzled, since you did not hear “My Favorite Things” in the band’s performance. You wonder what it would mean for this to have been a performance of “My Favorite Things,” and if it were not, was Coltrane simply lying, or mistaken about his own performance? And if it was a performance of “My Favorite Things,” by virtue of what was it so? Some years later you attend an Anthony Braxton Ensemble concert, advertised as the world premiere of a number of new compositions by Braxton. The setting this time is more familiar, a medium-­sized concert hall with music stands on the stage. The ensemble enters, the room is quiet, and the musicians open sheet music, placing it on their music stands. What follows for the next hour is very confusing. There seems to be little, if any, coordination between the musicians; none of the hallmarks of a musical work are manifest in this performance. There is no melodic material per se. There are no subgroups of musicians playing the same lines. There is little if any harmonic development that you can discern, nor, often, any obvious time signatures or rhythms. While the band was clearly paying attention to their sheet music, flipping pages and the like, you wonder, “In what sense were musical works performed?” It sounded to you as if they were all improvising. In the same festival where the Braxton Ensemble performed, you also attend a performance by a group led by Marilyn Crispell. Here the band appears on stage with no music, and with the slightest nod from Marilyn, begins playing. After about forty minutes they stop, smiling at each other. While there were passages where something like recognizable musical form emerged, this was what is called “free improvisation.” Here you wonder, “Just what is free improvisation?” Was it just a performance—­and if so, a performance of what? Was a musical work created before your eyes and ears? You saw various members of the audience recording the concert; what did they record, and might certain uses of the recording determine what you witnessed? These questions are all clearly ontological, for they concern the nature of musical works and performance, their relationship, and the conditions under which a work is realized in performance.

Introduction  • 3

The core subject of this book is an investigation into these questions. What makes this book different from others’ attempts to get to the heart of the musical work/score/performance relationship is that I shall concern myself with unpacking this relationship while considering musics that foreground improvisation, particularly musics related to the jazz tradition. This has to date received scarcely any scrutiny, and certainly no extended treatment by philosophers. This is unfortunate, since, as the above examples are intended to demonstrate, the issues surrounding the performance of highly improvisatory musical works, or even the existence of musical works in such contexts, seem somewhat different from those that naturally arise when considering the classical Western art-­music tradition, that tradition usually considered when discussing questions in the ontology of music. For our audience member is far from merely imaginary—­I have heard these very questions asked about these and similar performances, and the questions she fictionally posed are real ones with unclear answers. These are not the questions of someone who simply lacks a basic understanding of improvisatory musical traditions, but valid questions for anyone to ask. Compared with Western art music, from which the common discourse of score/musical work/performance emerged, what is different when we turn our attention toward improvised musical traditions and what is the same? Are there perhaps universal musical principles of what musical works and their performances must be? While what follows does focus on these questions, I also discuss issues seemingly farther afield. For, as the above examples are also intended to help demonstrate, one’s ontological beliefs influence, and often determine, a bevy of aesthetic and social beliefs one has about such improvised musics, and crucially, the converse also holds. Did Coltrane perhaps perform a very bad version of “My Favorite Things,” if he performed it at all?1 Does he fail to understand the musical work, “My Favorite Things,” if he thinks that his performance should count as a performance of “My Favorite Things”? Worse still, might he not really even know how to play his horn, or understand standard musical notation, if he thinks that was a performance of “My Favorite Things”?2 If the Braxton Ensemble was performing a series of compositions by 1.  Leaving open the possibility that it was a bad performance of “My Favorite Things,” but perhaps a good performance of something else, or simply a good improvisation. 2.  While few today would take these last questions seriously, at the time of Coltrane’s post–­ “Sheets of Sound” experimentations his competence was questioned, and it is still not difficult to find jazz students who question his technique and “proper” mastery of his instrument.

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Braxton, which “parts” of the sounds they collectively produced were parts of the musical works they performed, and which were not? This might matter if I were to use a bit of a recording of this performance in a multisampled work of my own. Did I take part of Braxton’s musical work in the sample I used, and if so, have I infringed on his musical work copyright? Were musical works actually performed at all? And concerning Marilyn Crispell’s performance, what sort of musical practice did I witness? If Crispell, a musician with many years of experience and quite a following, were to apply for grants to support her artistic practice, what sort of grants should she be eligible for? Grants for composers (which tend to be rather lucrative)? But there is no score, and if there are any composers on the scene at all it seems to be the collective, not any individual. Perhaps performance grants—­but performance is considered to be the performance of musical works—­and that is what seems to be missing in her practice. We as a society treat composers, musicians, performers, and other agents in the world of music production differently—­but where are improvisers slotted in, and where should they be? Related to these questions is perhaps a more basic one: why improvise? In solo or, more often, group improvisation, what is one accomplishing? Is it only a musical gesture, or might the very act of improvising be both the site of socially, politically, and culturally important actions, and for the enactment of these actions3 To varying degrees I address all of these questions in what follows, but crucially I will be concerned to show how these issues are often intermeshed with basic ontological questions, and so there is reason to be concerned with the ontology even if one is not predisposed to find ontology interesting or important per se. Consider the quotation from David Cope at the beginning of this introduction. Here someone acutely aware of modern musical practices, including jazz practices, claims that improvisation raises no philosophical challenges but only notational ones, as if Western music’s reliance on notation is a given for all musics. Improvisation is, for Cope, to be defined insofar as it differs from notation, but why prioritize notation? And why assume at the outset that improvisation and notation are somehow necessarily at odds with each other? The lack of philosophical import granted to improvisational practices is presumably due to the assumption that one needs only to tweak the account of notation to fit in improvisation as some sort of deviation 3.  Of course theorists unified under the banner of “new musicology” have convincingly argued that the composition, performance, and reception of scored traditional Western art music is not socially, culturally, or politically inert.

Introduction  • 5

from a compositional norm. Yet it is not merely a barren thought experiment to ask, “What if we take improvisation and improvisational practices as a given, as well understood, and attempt to define, discuss, and analyze composition as a deviation from it?” How odd, anomalous, and perhaps uninteresting would composed music end up looking? For it is surely worth reminding ourselves that the vast majority of music-­making ever undertaken has been essentially improvisational, with relatively little being composed or fully notated.4 Any analysis of improvisation will be strongly colored by, and indebted to, the sophisticated and historically long-­lived basket of theories concerning composed music, but we should not fall prey to the easy assumption that such theories can simply be tweaked to reveal all that is interesting about improvisation. Even this thought experiment is of limited value5 if it assumes at the outset that different musical practices differ precisely, and only, insofar as their purely musical features differ (be they different techniques, nomenclatures, or what have you). For what now of Langston Hughes’s claim that race is omnipresent in music, particularly black music? Can issues of race (and, as we shall see, gender) “in” music be but notational issues? And Angela Davis sees in jazz the possibility of political action, perhaps a model for bringing about political freedom, surely a possibility that is not directly related to issues concerning notation per se. Are we to dismiss these views as merely ill-­informed? A more nuanced and historically and culturally accurate way of considering improvised music is slowly emerging in the new field of improvisational studies. Yet mainstream contemporary philosophy, much of which has developed contemporaneously with jazz, has been rather slow both to turn its attention toward jazz and to realize that with jazz and other improvised musics there exist challenges to many accepted theories in the philosophy of music. There is, or needs to be, a philosophy of jazz, or philosophies of jazz, if jazz is not to be continued to be seen, by philosophers at least, as just a variant of other Western white-­dominated musical practices, practices that assume at the outset that jazz is either aesthetically unimportant (and that is what one is trying to demonstrate), devoid of social or political significance (or perhaps of the same significance as other 4.  See Derek Bailey, Improvisation, for an articulation of this point. 5.  As we shall see, one misses the point of many improvisational musical practices if one focuses only on their purely musical features and how they relate to notational practices. For such a focus ignores the crucial performative, social, and political aspects of much improvised music.

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white-­dominated musical practices), or merely an offshoot of some distinct, usually European, practice.6 Perhaps (inevitably, I think), many similarities will emerge between what a philosophically informed investigation of jazz will say about jazz compared to other musical practices, but it is the differences that will be crucial. For, as I shall argue, the distinct history, techniques, functions, and cultural embeddedness of jazz demand that a philosophically responsible investigation of jazz in many ways be conducted differently than such an investigation of, say, Baroque figured bass. Don’t get me wrong—­the philosophical arrows one wishes to employ are the same: careful logical analysis and arguments that are historically and culturally accurate, and a desire to probe beneath the surface of claims made in order to tease out the philosophical ramifications of positions taken. But they must be employed from a position that takes as possible, at least, views such as those of Hughes and Davis, let alone such jazz luminaries as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Wadada Leo Smith. One will inevitably disagree with some of the claims of insiders of the world of jazz (just as they disagree with each other), but the reasons for doing so should not simply be the inability of their views to square with a “one size fits all” philosophy of music; rather, they should be the result of the development of a philosophy of music ideally suited to jazz that examines what it is, and why it is what it is. This book is the beginning of such an attempt, and where I fail this is due largely, I hope, to the intrinsic difficulty in recognizing one’s own cultural and philosophical biases, and effectively ferreting such biases out in the views of others. Much of the existing literature in the philosophy of music has its agenda set by the particular ontology of music being assumed or argued for. The centrality of the musical work concept in the philosophy of music determines, I will argue, so much else that is said about music that a place for it in the study of improvised musics is called for. I came to realize that genre theory, which is so crucial to determining the ways we chose to talk about various musics, is really just ontology with its hands dirty, ontology that considers the actual ways individuals and communities use, interrogate, and modify assorted musical concepts, and music itself. Yet genres are highly fluid, changing, and contested entities, and obviously configured, partially at least, around social and other nonmusical allegiances. In this sense they are opposed to the most long-­lasting and most-­studied ontological status something can have, that of being a changeless, eternal Platonic entity, mod6.  For example, Theodor Adorno, clearly the most read and influential philosopher of music, holds all three of these positions. See, for instance, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.

Introduction  • 7

eled most famously by Plato’s forms. Yet it is this Platonic model and its variants that dominate ontological theories of the musical work. The term “jazz,” taken as being innocent by most philosophers of music, is already a highly politically charged genre term, one that comes with assorted ontological baggage, depending on how one chooses to employ the category. By viewing many of the most contentious debates in improvisational and jazz studies as being, at root, based essentially in ontological differences, one sees the need for a philosophically sophisticated analysis of the underlying ontological assumptions. What follows is an attempt to tease a number of them out, and is intended to be not the last word on the subject, but, perhaps, one of the first. The members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) have tended to shun the term “jazz,” in favor of “Great Black Music.” A general unhappiness with the term “jazz” goes far back, at least to early Ellington. What many have realized is that the term itself is a form of segregation imposed from the outside, for it serves often to demarcate this music from so-­called serious music.7 This ghettoization continues to have profound ramifications. It is easy to still find the reflexive equation of serious music with classical music; jazz programs are segregated in the academy, and are often little more than training facilities for wedding bands; granting agencies have separate grants and smaller budgets for jazz; and its status as a kind of popular music has, I think, led to its relative invisibility to philosophers.8 Even among critics who view jazz as an important art form and lionize many of its creators, the category “jazz” often tends to corral these artists into a pen not necessarily of their own choosing. I am very sympathetic with those who shun the word “jazz”; indeed I am not certain there is such a thing.9 For reasons having little to do with anything other than orthographic ease, I will employ the term, but I urge you to consider the subject of my 7.  Other important musicians have shunned the use of the term “jazz,” such as Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. See, for example, Miles Davis’s 1982 interview with Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show (1:55; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHeYG9SNaS0). 8.  Actually jazz often falls between the cracks in philosophically informed musical discourses. Those who work on “serious” music simply ignore it, while those philosophers who work on popular music often find jazz to be too “fine” an art to fit into their discourses. Neither fish nor fowl, it is “too rich” a morsel for a philosophy of popular music, while too “lean” for those who attend to “art music.” 9.  The claim is not, of course, that most would deny that many examples of music are to be thought of as examples of jazz, but that attempts to define jazz are not just ultimately fruitless, but useless. For jazz scholarship and criticism has, from its inception, focused on strongly essentializing accounts of jazz. In Chapter Four we will look at the AACM’s reasons for postulating the category “Great Black Music,” as opposed to “jazz.”

8  •  in ten ts a n d p u r p o se s

study to be what I think it actually is: Great Black Music and the constellation of musics influenced by it.10 Here is a brief summary of what follows. The introduction argues, in rather general terms, why an ontology of improvised music might be both of interest and importance. Given that ontology is a rather daunting endeavor, coupled with the fact that assorted strands of postmodernist theorizing have questioned the need for, or possibility of, ontological enquiry, such an argument is called for. Here I both rehearse and develop arguments as to why we employ the musical work concept, and how improvisation may problematize its use. I discuss the dominant ontological theories of the musical work, and the notion of hybrid artworks, with an eye toward both establishing the ontological lay of the land, and questioning the “pure” art status of much improvised music. I also argue that there is good reason to examine in particular avant-­garde improvised music and its accompanying discourses, for both their ontological commitments and content. Chapter One is a sustained argument for recognition of the aesthetic and political ramifications that follow from the employment of a musical work concept. This is accomplished by examining intellectual property law concerning musical works, performance, and improvisation. In particular, I examine in detail a case involving the improviser and composer James Newton and the popular rap group the Beastie Boys. This chapter’s broad purpose is to demonstrate the embeddedness of ontology in the aesthetics and politics of music, while its narrow purpose is to critique existing intellectual property law concerning the musical work and to suggest modifications. Often those who do not see the connections between ontology, aesthetics, and politics in music will do so on considering intellectual property law. With this case we will see that the conflict surrounds alternative, and here opposing, conceptions of the musical work—­the dominant view drawing on the discourses surrounding European art music, and an Afrological view drawing on a variety of black musics, many highly improvisatory, including those that draw from and intersect with European art music. Chapter Two begins with a general discussion of music and intentionalism, and argues for the importance of a detailed examination of 10.  This term too, demands interrogation as to what sort of genre assumptions it is making. What this term seems to (rightly) lack, which most attempts at defining jazz search for, is some sort of set of auditory features definitive of such music. While the expression “Great Black Music” may, under certain interpretations, fall prey to questionable essentialist theorizing, it seems grounded in contingent histories of music production in a manner that may actually assist those who wish to talk about such musics. See Chapter Four for a further discussion of this expression.

Introduction  • 9

the intentions behind acts of work creation, performance, and improvisation. In an attempt to distinguish the intentions behind acts of work performance vs. improvisations, I consider the case of improvising robots and what they may tell us about the differences and similarities between work performance and improvisation. In particular, this chapter sets up a series of philosophical challenges regarding the possibility of improvising machines, and then offers a solution to them, with the perhaps surprising conclusion that the attitude we take to improvising with machines is in fact the same that we take toward our human fellow improvisers—­an attitude strongly grounded in a particular use of our imagination. Here too the positive conclusion will be shown to be both in keeping with and suggested by an Afrological aesthetics. Chapter Three focuses on the relationship of a performance to the musical work it is a performance of, and, crucially, to other such performances. Here I argue that the improvised performances of musical works change the work itself, and that a particular modal logic can help make sense of this—­ one that is somewhat nonstandard, as possibilities are not eternally fixed. I relate this both to recent work in music cognition and work in mediation theory as applied to digitally mediated music. I also consider discussions by sociologists, art historians, and philosophers concerning the question of when an artwork is completed, and suggest that many improvisations based on (pre)existing tunes are best seen as acts of the continued creation of a musical work. Again, a model that allows for the continued alteration of musical works via their performance history will be shown to be in keeping with an Afrological aesthetic, in particular the emphasis on revision and performance that such an aesthetic endorses. Chapter Four considers some precise case studies to show how genre theory affects our ontological thinking about music generally and improvised music in particular. Here I develop a theory of what I call “aesthetic denseness,” namely that musical performances that positively invite consideration from numerous genre positions take on thicker aesthetic properties, and that these properties have ontological ramifications. I go on to show that many avant-­garde improvised musical movements grounded in an Afrological aesthetics have as their goal such aesthetic thickening. I conclude with a discussion of the highly influential theory called relational aesthetics, and its relationship to improvised music and the discourses many improvisers employ. I also place a particular school of improvisation, that practiced by the AACM, within the context of modernist and postmodernist debates in music. Here we see, in great detail, the interweaving of the political, aesthetic, and ontological.

10  •  in ten ts a n d p u r pose s

Chapter Five ties everything together by developing a positive theory of improvised musical works and performances that is both representational, fallibilist, and epistemic. That is to say, improvised performances of musical works are shown to be ways of representing the work performed, open to failures of representational fidelity, which manifest an improviser’s understanding of the work at hand. The kinds of representations at play will be shown to bear striking similarities with pictorial depictions. This entirely new theory allows us to make sense of the differences between free improvisations, the improvised performances of pre-­existing musical works, and traditional musical work performances without doing damage to the varied discourses music makers employ. I will show how literary theory, and the notions of paraphrase and signifying, can help us make sense of the relationships improvised performances may stand in with respect to the song or tune they are based on. In other words, the representational theory of performance developed here will be shown to be an Afrological theory, and so an alternative to those theories of performance that have emerged out of consideration of European art music. There are two “practical” guiding principles of this book. The first is that the thoughts of musicians concerning their own creative activities must be taken very seriously. The world of jazz scholarship, criticism, and journalism has a history of silencing musicians when their accounts of their practices did not fit with what some critic, theorist, or other thought.11 Assumptions are made about the motivations and nature behind them and evidence is then selectively chosen, or ignored. Complex practices, which often spring from a diversity of motivations and interests, are simplified and reduced in the critic’s alembic, resulting in a version of fool’s gold, accounts that make sweeping pronouncements about whole swaths of cultural practices but are ultimately of little value. Philosophical discussions of jazz, particularly those emerging out of analytic aesthetics, have been particularly guilty of this. It has been particularly difficult for philosophical models of jazz practice to move outside of the paradigms that have been applied to Western art music. Jazz is often either seen as squarely in opposition to European high-­art music, or viewed with critical and analytic lenses developed for and by art-­music practices. Jazz is either a wholly opposed other or a poor stepchild to the European art-­music tradition. That jazz might be a product 11.  For example, see Don De Michael’s interview with John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, which appeared in Down Beat, April 12, 1962, pp. 20–­23. A unifying characteristic of new musicology and improvisational studies is a sensitivity toward, and a reliance on, ethnographic evidence.

Introduction  • 11

of a hybrid basket of concerns, techniques, influences, and motivations is often ignored.12 Far too many binary oppositions are set up contrasting jazz practices with other musical practices, like old-­fashioned taxonomic charts contrasting, say, mammals and reptiles, and with the implied essentialism that such charts suggest. We need to interrogate what musicians themselves think about their practices. There is, I think, the related need that one must be an improviser to interrogate the performative, phenomenological, and social aspects of improvisation.13 For these aspects of improvisation are performed, experienced, or both by the improvisers themselves, and not transparently open to external scrutiny, at least not totally. Actually, I believe, perhaps controversially, that this is true of anyone: to write about the arts, one must practice them.14 The historical failure of this to be the case is partially responsible for an odd and often overlooked aspect of much philosophical art discourse—­that it concentrates on the perspective of perceivers, viewers, and audiences, over that of creators and participants. This is a rather grave problem for arts that are highly participatory and collaborative, as improvisational musical arts are. For this reason my initial decision to work on improvised music corresponded with a return to improvising myself. I am deeply indebted to the many musicians I have improvised with and who have allowed me to enter their community. Their voices are very much built into the fabric of this book. The title of this book draws on the title of a 1966 recording by the Bill Dixon Orchestra. This album manifests most effectively and beautifully the continuum between improvisation and composition, while Bill Dixon’s own 12.  The hybrid nature of jazz is now well entrenched in jazz studies, but has yet to have had much influence on the philosophy of jazz. 13.  There is this need if one is to be able to understand properly the comments of improvisers about their own practices. Improvisers often talk about improvising in a way that may very well be obscure to those who do not improvise themselves. And why should this be otherwise? It is only if you assume at the start that improvisation is simply a practice for the production of music that lacks certain features of score-­driven musical production, that you might think it can be understood without having the specialist’s knowledge that we think is necessary to understand virtually all other cultural or artistic practices. This need also follows from the fact that there is little agreement concerning the nature of improvisation, and so there is no commonly accepted set of assumptions that one can learn as a nonimproviser. 14.  I do not mean to assert that nothing can be known about a given art by someone who does not practice it, if for no other reason than there may well be widely accepted accounts of individual art practices, and widely accepted agreement about a given art’s features and function. However, it is often very difficult to discern when and how the knowledge that comes with knowing how to practice a given art might affect what else one might believe about that art.

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artistic practices, writings, and life reveal the intertwining of the ontological, aesthetic, and political in improvised music. Mr. Dixon passed while I was writing this manuscript, and it is humbly dedicated to his memory. I suspect he would find much to fault in it, and propose alternative views and theories. Yet I hope there is also much here that he would consider to take the debate forward. When the moving party has carried its burden under rule 56, its opponent must do more than simply show that there is some metaphysical doubt as to the material facts. —­U.S. Supreme Court, in Matsushita Electrical Company v. Zenith Radio Corp, 475 U.S. 586-­87, 106S. Ct. at 1356, cited Newton v. Diamond, 204 F. Supp. 2d 1244; 202 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10247 A musical composition consists of rhythm, harmony, and melody, and it is from these elements that originality is to be determined. —­Newton v. Diamond, 204 F. Supp. 2d 1244; 202 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10247 There is never any end, there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror. —­John Coltrane, Meditations liner notes, Impulse A-­9110, 1966 The parts of philosophy are inseparable from one another. . . . Posidonius said he preferred to compare philosophy to a living being—­ physics to the blood and flesh, logic to the bones and sinews, and ethics to the soul. —­Sextus Empiricus, AP 7.19

The Stoics, both under their founder Zeno of Citium and through their flowering under the leadership of Chrysippus, agreed about the unity and interrelationships between the parts of philosophy. Concerning the parts of philosophy, “no part is given preference over another, but they are mixed together, and [the Stoics] transmit them in mixed form.”15 Whatever one 15.  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, 7.40.

Introduction  • 13

may think of the details of Stoic philosophy (and there is much to admire), and in general of such systematic philosophical systems, one thing the Stoics were well aware of is the interconnectedness of one’s metaphysical views with one’s ethical and political views. The Stoics chose to ground their moral and political theory on an account of nature in general, and human nature in particular. Many now find fault with such essentialist theorizing, but the Stoics, to their credit, were well aware that their metaphysics not only colors their moral theorizing, but both motivates and grounds it. Yet the rejection of such unified philosophical programs does not, in and of itself, cleave the connections between metaphysics and politics. Indeed, often all that happens is that the connections become hidden, with, as I hope to demonstrate, a negative political impact on those who find themselves and their cultural products on the metaphysical outside looking in.16 I will explore the manner in which questions in the ontology of music have had and continue to have perhaps unexpected political ramifications. The focus will be on the notion of a musical work, and its application to improvisational musical traditions, particularly jazz. For as we shall see, what one takes a musical work to be is hardly a value-­neutral enterprise. For fixing what a musical work is affects what one takes to be the aesthetically relevant features of such works, determines when and how such works are created, and drastically affects precisely what roles composers, performers, and others have in the creation of music.17 But most generally, a particular ontology of music tells one when music has been created and what it is that has been created; it determines when an act of artistic creation has taken place. More specifically, the endorsement of a particular ontology of music can make it difficult to discern the social and political role that music-­making may have for certain communities, since certain ontologies of music rule out even the possibility of music discharging certain social or political functions.18 16.  It is also worth noting that the Stoics would have made no distinction between philosophical inquiries and those that we might now consider to fall under the purview of other disciplines. The desired unity of their thought encompassed what we would now consider to be sociology, anthropology, assorted exact sciences, and cultural theory broadly construed. What follows is a plea to strive for something like this Stoic unity by endeavoring to develop an ontology of music that is in accord with a sociology and anthropology of music—­an ontology that fits with a detailed account of how music fits into a given community’s assorted communicative practices. 17.  For a related point see Lydia Goehr, “‘Music has no meaning to speak of.’” But note that the question of whether or not “pure” instrumental music can have meaning, political or otherwise, is related to, yet distinct from, the question of whether what one takes a musical work in general to be is already a political question. 18.  For instance, if one’s ontology of music has it that music cannot have propositional

14  •  in t en ts a n d p u r poses

The ontology of music that one accepts therefore affects both the politics of music reception (criticism, aesthetics, value) and the political instrumentality that one believes music may have.19 I hope to demonstrate that the ontologies of music currently most in favor have serious, and often pernicious, ramifications when they are applied to many improvisational musics, particularly Afrological musics such as jazz. This may suggest, as a remedy, jettisoning the musical work concept altogether, particularly once one realizes the often-­pernicious effects of its application outside of the Western art-­music tradition from which it issued. One might also take solace in the magisterial work of Lydia Goehr, who argues convincingly for the socially and historically constructed nature of the musical work concept.20 Acceptance of Goehr’s thesis might suggest an answer to the question on the status of the musical work concept in improvised musics such as jazz—­that there is none. I am strongly tempted (for reasons that will become clear) by this option, however it is too quick. First, many of those who wish to jettison the work concept really mean to argue that there should not or need not be a work concept when considering improvised music, not that there is not. The claim, in effect, is something like this: “Would it not be better if we rid ourselves of the work concept, and so its history and associated metaphysics?” Now even if one is sympathetic to this claim, as I am, it does not speak to the fact that the work concept is employed in many discourses concerning improvised music. For this concept is so embedded in our discourse concerning music, including music largely improvised, that there are reasons to attempt to find a work concept (or a family of concepts) appropriate for improvised and jazz music. The main reason is the fact that many improvisers do employ the work concept when discussing their own practices, and we need to make sense of this. For crucially, improvisation should not be considered merely to be the polar opposite of composition. Many improviser composers, often taken by the public to be “mere” improvisers who are not in any sense composers, employ a range of methods and techniques, both predetermined and otherwise, using both traditional and alternative forms of notation, or nonnotational performance instructions, or none at all, to realize their music content, then it cannot function in any manner that demands such content. 19.  One might, as many have, err in the other direction by viewing certain improvising musics (such as free jazz) as intending to be merely a form of political speech, like so many placards in bold fonts, and so fail to interrogate how such musics might be intended, among other things, to enter into dialogue with “high art music” histories, practices and criticism. 20.  Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works.

Introduction  • 15

in performance. To think that one is either improvising or playing a precomposed notated work is to endorse a false dichotomy, and is but one of the many binary ontological assumptions that we need to question. What follows from this is that it is unwarranted to simply assume that nothing like a musical work is on the scene if one is faced with an improvisational musical act.21 For example, such a move would make it perhaps impossible to explain many highly improvisatory performances of preexisting songs. With Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things,” for instance, we have both performances of a preexisting musical work and improvisations.22 The theory of musical works developed here recognizes that the work is not so much a fixed bit of the furniture of reality, but a highly contextual and fluid entity. When trying to identify a musical work, we will see that no univocal set of identity conditions can, or should, be given. An additional reason, closely related to the first, is highly contextual: much musical discourse, including that of musical analysis, history, intellectual property law, philosophy, criticism, journalism, and so on, often takes the musical work for granted.23 While there may be little agreement between these overlapping yet distinct discourses concerning what the musical work is, or little cognizance even of the problems surrounding the concept, such discourses do employ the musical work concept.24 We valorize creators of musical works as the geniuses of the musical arts, we offer legal protections to musical works and their creators (of crucial social, cultural, and economic importance), and, by taking the score/work/performance trilogy as given 21.  For example, see the recent musicological study of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, by Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago, for a technical analysis of the manners in which composition and improvisation may be intertwined. 22.  As we shall see, such improvised performances might be creations of new musical works at the same time that they are performances of preexisting musical works. 23.  A key difference between the first and the third reasons is this: the third reason considers the perspective of the dominant Western discourse concerning music, which takes as its target Western classical music. The first considers the perspective of the class of improvisers, whose practices, and theories concerning them, are often disparaged if recognized at all by the dominant discourse. 24.  Of course these discourses themselves need to be relativized to particular communities or families of communities. To think that the musical work concept as embedded in the intellectual property theory at play in, say, US jurisprudence might be the same as found in the Blackfoot’s account of the ownership of communal songs, is obviously mistaken. There is no reason to believe that interrogating a particular community will yield a single static work concept at play. What follows is in many ways an extended argument for the need to consider the sociology, history, and anthropology of music when interrogating the musical work concept, a project that others have advocated (see, for example, Goehr, The Imaginary Museum).

16  •  in ten ts a n d p u r poses

and fundamental, we develop theories of aesthetics, metaphysics, and other philosophical and evaluative musical theories from this perspective. When musical traditions seen as “nonstandard” are considered at all, existing theories are tweaked with little interrogation of the theories themselves. We are, in a sense, “stuck” with the discourse of the musical work, and to jettison it would be seen, not so much as the development of an alternative in which the musical work concept as normally understood is inappropriate, but as the development of a theory to account for music where the musical work is, as a matter of fact, absent. We need to come to grips with the work concept in improvisation. This is a powerful reason not to disavow it completely, but not a reason to refrain from interrogating the use of the concept, to see why, and if, it fits with our intuitions and practices concerning music in general and specific genres of music in particular.25 Even if we end up with reason to employ the concept when discussing improvised music and jazz, it may well not be that the work concept we might fruitfully employ when considering such musics is the very same as competing accounts of the musical work that have been developed taking a subset of European art music as their model. In fact, the model(s) found most fruitful for discussing improvised and jazz musics may differ radically from these models, so much so that someone wed to the work concept as found in discourses indexed to Western classical music plausibly might wonder whether it is still the musical work that is being discussed at all. There are two main reasons to interrogate the work concept in improvised/jazz musics that suggest that its employment differs from how it is employed in discussions of Western classical music. The first focuses on the notion of the musical work itself. Here the main source of such questioning will be the fluidity of the identity of the musical work when discussing improvised musics. One feature that the dominant models of the musical work that are applied to classical music share is the fixity of the musical work. That is to say, the work itself is thought to be changeless throughout its existence (whether it is eternal, timeless, or created), and performances are thought either to instance a work or not, as the case may be, and to instance (apart from extremely ad hoc and artificial examples) at best one work only. The world of musical works is thought to be a static world, while 25. Precisely whose intuitions we might want to consider, and even if this were decided, determining whether or not we are necessarily left with a single set of nonconflicting intuitions, will be important considerations in what follows.

Introduction  • 17

with improvised music we will see that it may well be best thought of as a fluid world. Such fluidity is inconsistent with a metaphysics grounded in fixed identity based on necessary and sufficient conditions. The challenge, and it is a daunting one, is to develop a coherent metaphysics of works and performances that can capture in a revealing fashion the fluid identity of such musical works. What follows takes steps in the direction of developing such a metaphysics. The second primary locus of difference between the use of the work concept by improvising communities and its use by those concerned primarily with Western art music concerns notions of normativity surrounding the creation of a musical work. When discussing classical music, a standard claim is that scores indicate musical works by making normative certain features of the musical work—­those features that collectively form the work’s essence (or at least part of this essence). As we shall see, such norm-­making instructions, and the associated intentions that accompany the composer’s creation of such norms, may well be lacking in much improvised music, or when present, may be employed in a radically different fashion. The view to be developed here concerning what distinguishes acts of composition from both the performance of preexisting works and acts of improvisation will focus on the assorted participants’ intentions, with these intentions often being of a communicative and social nature as opposed to norm-­establishing intentions. I will therefore foreground intentions more than some do, and often consider a different set of intentions than philosophers have tended to examine. The model that will finally emerge will see the relationship between performance and work as being more like the relationship between a representational painting and the object being represented than that of a token to its type. What follows is in many ways a plea to consider closely the actual history of the musical communities whose musical work concepts one wishes to understand. I reject wholeheartedly the assumption made by some that there is a single musical work concept appropriate for all musics. Such a claim appears to be simply wishful thinking, a metaphysician’s desire to be able to investigate the musical work as she might the nature of a prime number or an electron. Yet if we need to engage in serious cultural history to reveal the musical work concept as it is actually employed, as opposed to some ideal and idealized version of it, why not simply engage in cultural history? To object to metaphysicians’ role as judge and jury is not to undermine their role as expert witnesses. We do need cultural history if our account of the musical work is not to be simply a fiction or an idealization, if it is

18  •  in t en ts a n d p u r poses

to help us in any way understand the work concept and how it relates to a vast constellation of associated concepts.26 For this reason I will tend not to defer to certain standard operating principles employed by metaphysicians. I will not assume that a simpler theory is, in and of itself, better than a more complicated one, but will prefer those theories that track some actual discourse concerning the musical work. I also do not assume that the musical work, for all communities that employ the concept, must fit ontologically into some preexisting category for that community (a form of ontological simplicity). We may discover that musical works are, for a given community, ontologically distinct and interesting beasts.27 In other words, I hope to supply the cultural historian with some new tools with which to interrogate the work concept when it is encountered. In this sense my work is very much in the spirit of Lydia Goehr’s, for I hope to tease out the musical work concept or concepts at play in actual historically situated musical communities and see what metaphysical assumptions are being made. This task is complicated by what I see as an ontological ramification of what Ingrid Monson has called jazz musicians’ “situational” attitude toward political allegiances, particularly during and with respect to the civil rights movement in the United States.28 If the ontological and the political are intimately entwined, then a willingness, or even a need, to take varied, perhaps even at times contradictory, political stances may well also yield a commitment to varied and perhaps contradictory ontological positions concerning the status of the musical work. One may, for example, hold one position when facing an issue surrounding intellectual property and another when considering one’s own performance practices taken as a whole. We shall see how this is the case, and it complicates even further attempts to glean a single ontology of improvised works emerging from the jazz tradition. I hope to demonstrate that such “ontological/political pluralism,” far from being a refusal to engage in robust ontological theorizing, is actually required by the improvisational musical practices one is hoping to understand, and the varied ways they reflect themselves in diverse discourses and social contexts. 26.  While there are certainly metaphysicians of music who recognize that their accounts of the musical work must closely track some particular history of the work concept, this methodological principle is sometimes simply ignored, or, more strangely, forgotten, particularly when turning to improvised music in general, and jazz in particular. For example, Julian Dodd is guilty of the former while Stephen Davies is guilty of the latter. 27.  I do not therefore take it as a prima facie objection to a given conception of the musical work that musical works come out as ontologically unique. 28.  See Monson, Freedom Sounds.

Introduction  • 19

The precise work concept one employs affects in ways that are not always apparent a nexus of other issues concerning music. For what one thinks music in general is, and musical works in particular are, affects the kinds of properties both music and musical works can manifest. For example, what kinds of expressive, aesthetic, and semantic features (to pick out three important and highly contested sets of properties often considered when discussing music) music, musical works, and musical performances have, or fail to have, depends not just on what one takes these properties to be, but on what one takes that which they are said to be properties of to be. This fact makes it doubly important to interrogate the concepts of music and the musical work as philosophers of music have developed them. For precisely which ontological concept one endorses may very well determine to a great extent the kinds of properties one plausibly sees music, musical works, performances, and scores as capable of having. The last thirty or so years of scholarship in the philosophy of music has seen considerable effort undertaken to uncover the nature of musical works.29 Much light has been shed on this knotty problem in the ontology of music, and some of the most insightful and philosophically sophisticated writings in the philosophy of music have focused on this subject. To pick out but four prominent examples, Peter Kivy and Jerrold Levinson have done much to set many of the terms of the contemporary debate, while, as mentioned previously, Lydia Goehr has raised assorted challenges to their positions via both an examination of the history of Western art-­music practices and a “metacritique” of what she sees as the shortcomings of their analytic method. These three are all concerned with accounting for Western classical music. Stephen Davies has developed a “third way,” conceived to take into account a wider collection of musical practices that seem to employ the work concept, than the previously mentioned authors consider. More 29.  For example, see: Wolterstorff, “Toward an Ontology of Art Works”; Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition; Thom, For an Audience; Levinson, “Hybrid Art Forms”; Margolis, Art and Philosophy; Ingarden, The Work of Music; Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music; Goodman, Languages of Art; Goehr, The Imaginary Museum; Dodd, Works of Music; S. Davies, Musical Works; D. Davies, Art as Performance. I focus on philosophers engaged, broadly speaking, in debates concerning the nature of music and the musical work from the analytic tradition. Such thinkers do not have a monopoly on theorizing about the musical work (far from it), but they have explored, more than others, how the musical work concept might fit into more general discourses on ontology, and, as we shall see, aspects of the general tenor of such theorizing seem to have entered assorted non-­philosophic discourses. Others in this tradition have begun to question the methods and conclusions of analytic ontology of music. See, for example, Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art,” “Debates About the Ontology of Art”; and Ridley, The Philosophy of Music.

20  •  in t en ts a n d p u r pose s

recently still, Julian Dodd has defended a robustly Platonic conception of the musical work, employing a “simple” type/token model based on what he sees as “our” most fundamental intuitions concerning the musical work, intended, interestingly, to cover jazz works.30 I am clearly indebted to all of these authors. However, my focus on jazz music in particular, and improvised musics more generally, will point toward shortcomings in these accounts, at least when attempting to generalize them to cover such improvising musical traditions. These authors would, I think, cheerfully recognize many of these shortcomings, since their accounts were, for the most part, never intended to explain all musical traditions. I will discuss only those that reveal what is distinctive of the work concept in improvised music and that point toward a model that can account for this distinctiveness. While I am not concerned here to directly critique these theories, those familiar with the family of theories concerning the status of the musical work that have emerged out of the analytic tradition should find ample material here to formulate such critiques. The methods I employ are at times somewhat different from those employed by many of the theorists just mentioned. For instance, I find little value in thought experiments when applied to the ontology of music. I do not think that a particular theory should fall or garner endorsement depending on what it might say about cases of simultaneous composition of the same sound structure by two distinct composers, odd substitutions of identical scores with mislabeled composers, Martian compositions, and the like.31 For my intuitions about such cases, when I even have them, are highly colored, as they should be, by some community’s actual use of the musical work concept. Existing usage determines intuitions, and we cannot escape, nor should we try to, the history of the musical work concept. It is 30.  In fact, Dodd’s account is intended to cover all music. 31.  Such thought experiments might push us to think hard about the musical work concept, and perhaps reveal inconsistencies among our beliefs. I simply do not prioritize our intuitions about such cases over our actual practices involving the work concept. It appears to me that more weight and intellectual attention are often given to these puzzles than to an interrogation of how the work concept is actually employed by some community or other. Perhaps I simply suffer from a failure of imagination, but I often do not know what to say when asked, “Well, what are your intuitions about this rather odd case?” Such thought experiments often suffer from an additional “modal” problem. They tend to ask you to consider a counterfactual situation that appears to be logically possible, but in fact demands a far more robust species of possibility for them to do their work. Often to assume that the counterfactual at play is more robustly possible is simply to beg the question at issue. What we can imagine as (merely) logically possible tells us little about concepts as embedded in contingent cultural histories as the musical work concept is.

Introduction  • 21

a sham to claim that one has intuitions about a concept that is so much a product of a particular contingent history of music production, apart from how one receives and conceives of this history. So I am worried if one’s favored account cannot explain the use of the work concept by the members of an actual musical community. I would like an account of the musical work to reflect usage—­for example, the “fact” (I do take it to be a fact) that each of John Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” is just that, as are performances of Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze.” If a theory tells me otherwise it is as problematic as the general ontology of music works Nelson Goodman developed, which has it that we are almost always incorrect in claiming that a given performance of a symphony is just that.32 If one is worried about which metaphysics might best capture usage, you need to tweak your metaphysics to account for usage, not decree from on high that a given usage is wrong. One’s metaphysics of music must serve to explain usage, not explain it away. In this sense I am strongly committed to a version of what is called “the pragmatic constraint” in the ontology of art as employed by theorists such as David Davies. Crudely put, epistemology must trump ontology when discussing art objects. What we think about musical works, and in particular the properties we ascribe to them that we take to be of crucial aesthetic importance, must be sustainable by our ontology of musical works. Our ontology of music should tell us what sorts of things musical works are if they are to have the properties and play the roles that a given community claims they do. True, such ontological inquiries might reveal unsettling problems with a given community’s set of beliefs concerning musical works, but the role of the ontology of music is to try to make sense of, and systematize when possible, our judgments concerning musical works, not decree what they must be.33 In very general terms, to be made clearer later, I will question some basic assumptions that the aforementioned authors make concerning music in general, assumptions that seem to be ill grounded when one considers jazz and many other improvised musics, particularly if one foregrounds the accounts many practitioners of these arts give of their own practices. Perhaps the most fundamental of these assumptions concerns what sort of thing music itself actually is, or, to put the point another way 32. Goodman, Languages of Art, 210. 33.  See D. Davies, Art as Performance, Chapter One, for a clear statement and discussion of this principle. An extended debate on the application of this principle to the ontology of music ensued; see Dodd’s Works of Music, Davies’s response in “The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art,” and Dodd’s rebuttal in “Adventures in the Metaontology of Art.”

22  •  in t en ts a n d p u r pose s

(following here, among others, Levinson), whether or not music, or some music, is a hybrid art. This is a question worth considering at this time. To put the point most simply (and therefore, in some ways misleadingly), is music just sound?34 When one interrogates a particular instance of music to discern its meaning (if it has any), its expressiveness (if any is present), its aesthetic properties (if it exemplifies any), etc., is one considering only sounds (even if they are considered as sounds embedded in a particular history and culture)? I will argue that for many improvised musics the answer to this question should be no—­the “art object” that one is intended to consider is essentially hybrid, often including far more than just sounds, even more than historically contextualized sounds, but also gesture, discursive stories, and perhaps elements of dance and other performative features. Social features of such music making will also be shown to be “cleaved off” from the artistic features only with great difficulty, and at the risk of yielding a crucial misunderstanding of the practice itself. Recognizing this will allow such music to embody meanings, expressions and, more generally, content that many have rightly seen as difficult to account for if music is just some sort of pure sound structure. Improvised music is a kind of practice, and this practice often essentially involves actions that are far more than just the production of sound.35

History and Hybridity There are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation . . . or else in the supranational history of its art. —­Milan Kundera, “Die Weltliteratur,” The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2007 You have heard the his-­tory, now hear my-­story. —­Sun Ra36 34.  Sonicism is sometimes taken to be the principle that all that enters into the identity conditions of a musical work is its “pure” sonic properties. Closely related to this is the question of whether or not, when forming judgments (aesthetic and other) about a work of music, it is proper to consider nonsonic features of the work. A whole nexus of questions get quickly entwined, some of which will be discussed below. 35.  The fact that most of our encounters with music these days are mediated by various electronic recording and transmission methods masks the obvious fact that music almost always involves bodies in motion. 36.  Transcribed from the film, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a 1980 documentary directed by Robert Mugge.

Introduction  • 23

The musical work concept goes hand in hand with a basic assumption concerning what music is, since the musical work concept, an ontological concept at root, developed out of a particular history of music production and a particular history of the relationship of music to other arts.37 For consider, we are faced with what we take to be music (these days, at least) in at least three overlapping situations. First, we may be sitting before a score, and then we may ask, what, or where, is the music? “Is music a literary art, or a graphic art?” is a question suggested by fixating on scores.38 Second, we may be witnessing a performance and so ask, quite naturally, if music is a performance art. Third, we may be interacting with a recording in some form and so ask whether music is an industrial art, a kind of manufacturing process.39 Each way we may interact with music suggests distinct answers to the question, “What is music?” Does music somehow essentially involve marks or symbols (fixating on scores), or bodies and bodily movements (fixating on performances), or machines and manufacturing (fixating on recordings)?40 Additionally, we may focus on the contexts and settings in which music-­ making and consumption take place, and conclude that music is essentially a social interaction.41 What, if anything, we decide to ignore when actually consuming music—­thinking about it, enjoying it, judging it—­and what we decide is part of “the music itself,” the object of our contemplation and enjoyment, is not naturally or neutrally given but is the product of our particular account of music and its relation to other arts. What you decide music is, at the broadest ontological level, affects almost everything else you will say about it. Is music, in some sense or other, “just 37.  For an insightful extended discussion of this see Goehr, The Imaginary Museum. Even if one is not convinced that the musical work itself is a cultural construction, it is clear that particular accounts of the musical work need to be indexed to particular genres of music and their histories. 38.  It is worth pondering the fact that much musicology involves careful analysis of scores, with the goal of revealing features of the associated music. Here a form of literary analysis is used to indirectly reveal features of a musical object, not a literary object. 39.  We also encounter music in a variety of functional settings, and so may ponder, for example, its political, military, and religious nature. When faced with any case of music-­ making, it is a nontrivial task to identify what parts of the complex series of events one is witnessing are the “musical” ones. That is to say, we operate with a tacit ontology of what music is even when we form a judgment as simple as “there is music here.” 40.  To generalize, traditional musicology tends toward the first position, new musicology toward the second, and popular music studies toward the third. 41.  An influential attempt to both recognize these assorted contexts and incorporate them into a single governing concept is that by Christopher Small and his coinage of the term “musicking” in his work of the same name (Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening).

24  •  in t en ts a n d p u r poses

sound”? The dominant answer to this question when faced with Western music practices (and then extended to all music via covert acts of cultural or theoretical hegemony) is yes, even if such sounds are thought to essentially inhabit particular historical and cultural positions.42 Yet what if, as I would like to suggest, this answer is often mistaken? What if music is, to employ the language of Western art theorists, a hybrid art? More specifically, what if the best account of the historical and cultural embeddedness of a particular musical practice has it that this musical practice is normally seen by those for whom this music is of paramount importance (its creators, performers, and primary audience) as a hybrid art?43 For Kundera, in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, there are only national and supranational histories of art objects and practices, while Sun Ra stresses a personal narrative to make sense of his musical practices. How does history enter into what we take an art form to be, and what histories are at play? It is well worth considering Levinson’s astute account of hybrid arts as found in his essay “Hybrid Art Forms.”44 It is crucial to note that Levinson is using the term “hybrid” in a different way than I am here. For him, an art is hybrid if, as a matter of contingent history, it is best seen as emerging out of two or more preexisting art forms. What I want to endorse is not so much the hybrid nature of much improvised music, given his notion of hybridity (although this may very well turn out to be case), but the degree to which all art forms are products of their contingent histories, whether they are best taken to be hybrid or basic. Levinson, quite rightly, argues that there is no ontological fact of the matter as to whether or not a given art is hybrid—­it is not a question of the structure of the art at issue. Whether an art is thought of as “basic” or hybrid is a matter of contingent history.45 If, as a matter of historical fact (or, more precisely, the dominantly accepted history) a given art is seen as emerging out of two other distinct art forms, then this, to some 42.  Although this has not always been the case, nor is it clear that those committed to the pure sonic nature of music are always consistent in holding this belief, or are even clear about what it entails. 43. To be more precise, we might decide that certain kinds of music are hybrid while others are not. There would not, therefore, be a single category of music, either hybrid or thoroughbred. 44.  Levinson’s essay “Hybrid Art Forms” appears as Chapter Two in his collection of essays entitled Music, Art, and Metaphysics. 45.  “. . . hybrid status is primarily a historical thing. . . . An art form is a hybrid one in virtue of its development and origin, in virtue of its emergence out of a field of previously existing artistic activities and concerns, two or more of which it in some sense combines” (Levinson, “Hybrid Art Forms,” 27).

Introduction  • 25

degree at least, fixes the discourse appropriately applied to the new art. It helps establish the terms by which it should be judged, the expectations one should come to it with, the natural contrasting art works to consider it in respect to, and so on. Levinson goes on to discuss the ways in which “thoroughbred” arts can be combined to form hybrids, but what is important for us are his claims about hybridity, history, and appreciation. First history. Levinson claims that “Only a historically informed analysis, not a purely material or dimension-­ individuating one, will capture the aesthetically important notion of hybrid art in actual use. A hybrid art form is an art form with a ‘past,’ and it is its miscegenetic history that makes it hybrid, not just the complex ‘face’ it presents.”46 This demonstrates just how important history is to ontology, that is, to what we take an art form (and so instances of it) to be, here “pure” or hybrid. Levinson does not pursue questions about the history of actual art to any degree in this article. We shall see that the heavily contested history of jazz now takes on greater importance once we recognize its ontological ramifications. For Levinson, “if works are artistic hybrids, in the primary sense, they must be understood in terms of and in light of their components. . . . The history of development of an art form remains relevant in understanding works in the form as it [sic] currently exists.”47 Here the claim is that whether or not a work is taken to be hybrid effects how we should understand the work, and how we understand a work crucially effects how we appreciate it. Both of these, understanding and appreciation, therefore rely on history. Yet it appears equally clear that the claim that “the history of development of an art form remains relevant in understanding works in the form as it currently exists” holds regardless of the status of the art form as pure or hybrid in Levinson’s sense. What the history of a given art form is taken to be, and by whom, loom large in our aesthetics of that art form. These linkages, which I believe Levinson both argues for and endorses, make clear how crucial history is to aesthetics.48 So if the history of a given art form is contested, far more is at stake then just historical “fact,” since distinct evaluative discourses may well require distinct histories if their claims are to be well grounded. To accept a particular history of a given art is to fix the boundaries of appro46.  Levinson, “Hybrid Art Forms,” 29–­30. 47.  Levinson, “Hybrid Art Forms,” 28. 48.  Indeed, as we shall see, this is one of the reasons behind Levinson’s precise formulation of the musical work. Musical works are, for him, firmly rooted in their particular history of production.

26  •  in ten ts a n d p u r pose s

priate evaluative discourse for that art, and to endorse a particular evaluative discourse is to accept (on pains of inconsistency) a certain history. This mutual interdependence of history and aesthetic discourse, while theoretically recognized, often is forgotten, and is behind many of the most hotly contested debates concerning improvised music.49 If history determines whether or not an art is hybrid, what are we to do with arts whose history is contested? Might not an art be hybrid for one community, yet “pure” for another, if these communities view the history of the art differently? Or might two communities receive the same history differently, so that for one a once-­hybrid art form is taken now to be pure, while for another its hybrid nature is still recognized and important? For the question of “purity” vs. hybridity concerns what are commonly taken to be subgenres of given arts as much as the arts themselves. We can ask, for example, if Impressionism is “just” realism coupled with sketching (and so hybrid),50 or a wholly “new” style of painting whose evaluative discourse need not be bound to those applied to the turn toward naturalism in late French salon painting. In other words, we need to ask not just if music itself is a hybrid art form, but also if particular kinds of music are. And of course we need to ask these questions from the perspective of a given community’s discourse on music or a kind of music.51 One may well discover that aesthetic disagreements about some music are based on viewing the music as embedded in conflicting histories and so differing ontologically if these distinct histories judge differently whether the music is pure or hybrid. And one might conclude that there is no single answer to this question “hybrid or not hybrid,” even when judged from a particular cultural location. More generally, if focus on the pure vs. hybrid question 49.  Consider, for example, Adorno on the role of syncopation in Stravinsky and jazz (“On Jazz,” pp. 470–­71 in Essays on Music), and the discourse surrounding the music of Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton. 50.  Of course, unless fin de siècle realism and sketching, respectively, have distinct evaluative discourses associated with them by virtue of their distinct histories, the hybridity of Impressionism may not matter. 51.  Here may lay a shortcoming with Levinson’s account. For it is at times unclear whether he recognizes the complexity of the question of the history of a given art—­of the political overtones of the endorsement of one or another history. He and others involved in debates concerning historicist theories of art often talk as if the notion of an art’s history is transparent, or at least objectively discoverable. Much work by feminist, race, and postcolonial theorists has demonstrated the complexity of questions of history and their importance for many discourses concerning the arts. It is now commonly recognized that talk of “the” history of anything is highly suspect.

Introduction  • 27

has us recognize that an art form’s history determines much of our understanding of the art form, then the contestation of an art form’s history is a debate about the proper content and boundaries of an understanding of that art form. And what can be said to characterize the history of jazz criticism more than viewing it as a long series of skirmishes concerning the “proper” history of jazz? The often vitriolic debates concerning the history of jazz can now be seen as having much at stake. For the so-­called “jazz wars,” which go back to the very earliest critical writings on jazz, both in North America and Europe (particularly France), are all about tracing a true and authentic history of jazz, a history can both ground and explain a particular evaluative discourse. In jazz studies, history is everything! We need to notice that the acceptance of differing histories may well result in jazz being viewed as pure or hybrid, with all that follows from this difference. I believe that many improvised musics are best understood when viewed as hybrid arts, and that one therefore needs to endorse a history of such musics that suggests this. Actually, the situation is perhaps best put in the reverse. The history of improvised music that best seems to capture its multifarious functions, its complex of influences, its practices and traditions, and its own historical narratives seems to suggest its hybrid nature. It follows that it is a mistake to fixate on pure sound structures when considering such music, for it is sound and then some.52 For example, many histories of jazz assume that what they are telling the story of is the development of sound structures (and so they assume at the outset what they should in effect be determining—­what jazz is taken to be by its practitioners), and much critical discourse about jazz goes astray for this same reason, assuming that the object of analysis, evaluation, and criticism is sound pure and simple.53 Additionally, what other musics one sees 52.  Recent, but still somewhat tentative, research in music cognition also suggests that the expressive properties of music supervene on both the sonic and visual components of musical performances. The philosophical implications of this sort of hybridity have begun to be examined by Bergeron and Lopes in their article “Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression.” They do not commit to conceiving of music as a sonic/visual hybrid, but they leave open the option. Perhaps the most influential study of the history of jazz, Ken Burns’s multipart documentary Jazz, is clear concerning the fact that jazz is far more than just sound, but uses this fact to argue for a particular social history as being encoded in the development of jazz forms. 53.  Of course one might discover particular improvised musics, and particular evaluative contexts, where consideration of sound structures (broadly construed) pure and simple is primarily what is called for. Yet, for example, the understanding of many AACM and Black Artists Group ensembles, let alone the practices of Cecil Taylor, are impoverished by not noticing their hybrid nature.

28  •  in ten ts a n d p u r poses

jazz both historically emerging out of and continuing to be in dialogue with also effects how one thinks it should be judged and evaluated. One result of this hybridity is that the ontology most appropriate for making sense of jazz and related improvised music may be one more normally applied to nonmusical arts. In particular, we will see how aspects of ontological theories first created to help make sense of both pictorial and literary arts can, and should, be brought to bear in attempts to understand jazz performance. Matters are complicated by the fact that histories are always histories for a given community, and community membership is itself fluid. Many jazz musicians themselves move between distinct discourses concerning their own practices (including historical discourses), treating their music as hybrid or pure as the case may be. Often, I believe, the reasons for this are social or political—­the discourse employed often depends on who is asking the questions, and in what context. And of course, nothing about the pure/ hybrid distinction per se rules out considering a given practice from the rival perspective in a perhaps interesting and revealing manner.54 To move between discourses in the manner that many jazz musicians do is, in effect, to deny the fixity of answers to the “hybrid or pure” question and so to deny the existence of only one history for jazz.55 What often ends up mattering most is the opinion of the dominant discourse, what it treats the art form as being, and the critical apparatus that it therefore employs in its analysis, which may often eclipse all competing accounts. In this sense jazz is doubly hybrid: it is best viewed as a hybrid art à la Levinson, yet it also is a hybrid of hybrid and pure arts; both discourses can be of value when considering jazz, and both discourses have been employed by jazz musicians. I believe that many African American vanguardist musicians are well aware of this “metahybridity” of jazz and move between the two discourses, subtly using the distinction between the 54.  This fact entails that any genre theory needs to be sensitive to the lack of genre specificity/fixity, and the competing genre discourses that such fluidity allows for. 55.  It would be a mistake, I think, to concede that jazz can be thought of as either pure or hybrid, yet in either case to count only its pure sonic features as those that appropriately enter into our aesthetic judgments concerning jazz, the rest being “merely” historical or social features irrelevant to our evaluative discourse. For this would be to misunderstand the role that such an ontological consideration should play in our aesthetic discourse, and historically has played. In addition, the sonic/nonsonic distinction, as we shall see, is far from a clear one. See George Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself, for a penetrating analysis of the AACM and the obstacles the members faced in having their music received within the histories of musical production that they felt were most appropriate.

Introduction  • 29

two. Much improvised music is best viewed as a hybrid performance art, which involves “pure” sound production coupled with movement, theater, storytelling, and often more. If correct, this may well allow such music to have the robust meaning many attribute to it (but that others find difficult to explain), to play the social functions many see it as playing and, finally, not to suffer from the aesthetic failures many have seen as implicit in improvisation per se. What follows is the beginning of an extended argument for these conclusions.56

Jazz, Improvised Music, and “the New Thing” I have spoken of “jazz and other improvised musics” on numerous occasions. What precisely is this book concerned with understanding? This is a legitimate question, yet I need to hedge. I believe that many of my conclusions help shed light on numerous improvised musical traditions, including most centrally jazz. Yet it would be rash to assert that any individual conclusion that follows, or the collection of them all, holds for all improvised musics. For improvisation, as Derek Bailey has noted, is the most ubiquitous musical practice.57 Musical traditions in some sense or other improvisational can be found in all cultures and all periods. Not only am I no expert in all musical traditions—­who is?—­but our ability to analyze critically many musical traditions is undermined by our lack of evidence. And so my conclusions are directed most clearly at the jazz tradition and musics closely related to it. But as we have seen, this tradition, and the term itself, are contested, and pick out (or crucially fail to pick out) different things for different people. The artists I will refer to most often flourished, more or less, after 1958 and constituted (and often continue to constitute) the avant-­garde of jazz. That is to say, I will be primarily concerned with 56.  Even if one is not convinced that jazz, or some of it, is to be viewed as hybrid in the Levinsonian sense, recognizing the contested history of jazz—­the lack of a single narrative to embed jazz practices within—­should result in a recognition that the history one picks effects profoundly the aesthetics one employs and the ontology correlated with it. For example, Adorno’s claim that what he sees as the historically most characteristic feature of jazz, its common use of syncopation, coupled with his claim that Stravinsky’s use of syncopation predates its use in jazz, is intended to be a criticism of jazz, pointing toward its aesthetic barrenness. It is only by embedding in a particular way the history of European art music with the history of jazz (let alone accepting these claims of historical priority) that this result follows. 57. Bailey, Improvisation.

30  •  in ten ts a n d p u r poses

post-­ 1958 jazz innovations, although hardly exclusively concerned with them.58 This choice, which some may find quite limiting and, worse, misleading, needs some explanation.59 I believe that this is a natural, fruitful, and appropriate music to interrogate if one is concerned with a philosophy of jazz. It is in perfect keeping with how many other philosophers of art often approach their subject, yet this fact is easily missed since it is occluded by the dominant history and critical discourse concerning jazz. Consider philosophers of the visual arts who focus on the modern period. They want to understand the art of Picasso, Duchamp, Pollack, and Rauschenberg (for example). They are concerned with how the art practices of artists such as these may change what we take a painting to be, or what we take representation or expressiveness to be. Some of the questions they ask are clearly ontological. Scholars of modern art tend not to turn their attention toward dilettante painters churned out by suburban community-­ center art classes or schooled in one of the thousands of art colleges. Many of the philosophically interesting questions in art are best asked of, and with respect to, new avant-­garde art, for this is the art that puts the history of its medium into perspective, asks new questions of the art form, challenges existing aesthetics, and so on.60 Such works often usher in new eras of art, with new associated aesthetics and ontologies, and as 58.  I will continue to use the contested term “jazz,” partially as a familiar and fairly effective way of demarcating a certain group of musicians, and partially as shorthand for the improvisational musical practices most often under consideration. It is no coincidence that the musicians I focus on are, by and large, the very musicians who question the validity and application of “jazz” as a genre term. I will return to this theme in Chapter Four. The term “avant-­garde” is equally thought to be suspect by some of those to be considered here, as is any genre term that historically was coined and subsequently used to demarcate some subset of white European art practices. For example, Sun Ra equated the “avant-­garde” with a necessary lack of humor, and so distanced his own practice from such a term (Szwed, Space Is the Place, 235). 59.  To concretely situate my artistic/aesthetic center, as I write this I am listening to The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums, and have cued up Organic Resonance (a live duo performance by Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton) and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, a live recording by the Cecil Taylor Unit. 60.  This is not to say that there is no philosophical interest in less revolutionary art practices, nor is it to assume a priori where interesting and avant-­garde art practices may be found. I do not assume any high art–­low art distinction; these comments are in a sense defensive, to demonstrate that the art I have chosen to investigate, for better or for worse, is very much in keeping with the distinct choices, and the reasons behind them, made by many philosophers of art.

Introduction  • 31

with science, it is such paradigm-­shifting practices that are often seen as the most fruitful to consider philosophically. No one raises an eyebrow when a philosophy of visual art draws primarily on such innovators of painting as those mentioned above, hoping to shed light on what they were trying to do, and so on what visual art can accomplish. Yet the few philosophical accounts of jazz that exist consider only an amorphous “mainstream” and often are either hostile to, or rather ignorant of, the likes of Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, late John Coltrane, and Jeanne Lee, all exemplary members of the jazz avant-­garde. A reason for this can be found in the reception that the jazz avant-­garde has tended to receive by both journalists and academics. There has been a concerted effort to marginalize such artists, to view “the New Thing” and related vanguardist movements in post-­1958 jazz as strange apparitions or dead-­end side streets, looking elsewhere to find new jazz practices worthy of admiration and study. Instead of seeing the practices of these artists as the natural and next stage in a progression from swing through bebop, or as a conscious and revolutionary break with this tradition (or anything in between), they are, more or less, ignored.61 I do not believe that a long demonstration of this needs to be undertaken. Much of the blame lies within the academy and its continuing practice of ignoring this period, seeing jazz as effectively ending with hard bop. Only a handful of recognized university-­based jazz programs take seriously the myriad innovations that came out, and continue to come out, of this particular avant-­garde—­imagine if almost all leading art schools still taught the techniques and thoughts of turn-­of-­the-­century French salon 61.  The last twenty-­odd years have seen a growth in academic consideration of these practices (but generally not by “academic” philosophers). Of course the artistic value and interest of such musicians has long been trumpeted by writers such as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and others primarily from within the African American community, but they have failed to have much influence on the more mainstream, dominant discourse concerning jazz. Although many visual artists closely associated with the avant-­garde of the last century or so initially faced much hostile press (witness the first New York Armory show, or the early Grande Palace shows and the hubbub concerning the early Impressionists), the critical stance taken toward them rapidly changed, so that the vast majority of those who proffer evaluations of such art see it as valuable. This has not happened with the jazz avant-­garde. Why this has not happened is an interesting question. I believe one reason is the often conscious marginalizing of their works that takes place to this day, so that many who deem themselves “au fait” with contemporary movements in jazz do not even know of their existence. Even (perhaps especially) insiders can perpetuate this exclusionary discourse; witness Wynton Marsalis and his conservative repertoire approach to jazz history, practice, and curatorship. While this state of affairs may be changing, it is changing rather slowly.

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painters and acted as if they were the only game in town. That really is the situation in the academy with respect to jazz, and if it is now changing, it is still changing slowly.62 Perhaps the philosophers are not to blame for treating their subject the same way as their fellow academics. Philosophers of physics turn to physicists to discern what are their pressing concerns, puzzles, and exemplary phenomena. If philosophers of music turn to their music faculties to discern what jazz practices are “cutting edge,” they may well find the university jazz band playing old charts from the Tonight Show and a jazz history sequence that ends with Miles Davis’s early electric period, if not earlier. I will give one personal example of this. I had the occasion to invite to a university campus with a large and very-­well-­thought-­of jazz department the composer, innovator, and brass player Bill Dixon. Mr. Dixon’s place in the history of music is, or should be, firmly established. He was clearly one of the most important innovators of the past forty-­odd years, and held, to boot, a university teaching position for much of this time. When I phoned the chair of the jazz trumpet department to tell him that Mr. Dixon would be coming to campus and ask if his students would like (gratis!) a master class from him, I was met with the response “Who is Bill Dixon?” Imagine if the chair of the painting department were to say, “Who is Cy Twombly?” or “Who is Frank Stella?” To this jazz department, Bill Dixon was (is?) literally a no one, since jazz innovation, for reasons never articulated (for, as even the most cursory investigation shows, they do not exist), is thought to have ended with, say, Tony Williams’s work with Miles Davis.63 Why is the jazz avant-­garde so often ignored by academics who would never consider doing the same to the avant-­gardes of the visual or literary arts? Here I speculate. The reasons for this erasure may well often have political motivations, and perhaps racist overtones. The discourses many black vanguardist musicians embedded within their practices and employed to explain these practices had much in common with (so-­called) radical black political thought. For this reason, such practices and people scared many (predominately) white critics and scholars, and they responded to what they saw (perhaps to some degree correctly) as a challenge to their control of the political and cultural aspects of art by, in effect, erasing these people and 62.  Interestingly, much of the recent interest in the jazz avant-­garde has emerged not out of music schools and programs, but from literature departments and American Studies programs. 63.  Perhaps resurrected, with a Colonial Williamsburg-­like sense of historical recreation, with Wynton Marsalis.

Introduction  • 33

practices from “official” histories and theories.64 Such music was (and often still is) seen as an overt endorsement of a radical political agenda, and so critical praise of such music was seen as a tacit endorsement of this agenda. Crudely put, two responses therefore predominate concerning such music: either it is viewed as merely thinly veiled political speech (and as such is seen as no challenge or competitor to European experimental music, and as having little place within a music or jazz curriculum), or it is disregarded altogether. Many have told this story,65 but what has gone under-­noticed is how this effects philosophizing about jazz: it yields articles concerned not with Cecil Taylor, but with cocktail-­lounge jazz. Once we return, so to speak, musicians such as Taylor to their proper place as leading music vanguardists, the need to argue for philosophically considering their practices evaporates. We can clearly see why we need to consider, say, the AACM’s motto of “Great Black Music from the past and the future,” to consider what Coltrane was doing when he stretched “My Favorite Things” into hour-­long performances, to interrogate Leo Smith’s use of silence, to puzzle over Jeanne Lee’s recitation of “Blasé,” and so on, if we want to understand the evolution of the art form that is called jazz.66

64.  For one example of this see Monson, Freedom Sounds, for an analysis of Abbey Lincoln’s performance on the “Freedom Now Suite” and the accusation made that she was merely pandering to her “blackness.” 65.  For example, see Baraka, Black Music; Kofsky, Black Nationalism; Kofsky, John Cotrane; and G. Lewis, A Power, for a sane and calm analysis of this. 66.  A overtly racist motivation behind this erasure should not be ruled out. The canonical visual art avant-­garde are almost exclusively white. It is only very recently that critical and commercial attention has turned toward visual artists of color.

One

What Does the Law Hear? James Newton and the Beastie Boys

Musical aesthetics inhabits the broad umbra of the musical work concept. Much criticism is directed toward musical works, and considers performances primarily insofar as they reveal or occlude aesthetically relevant features thought to be inherent in the work itself. In this sense, much criticism views performances primarily, if not solely, as mediation devices for hearing musical works, devices intended to be as transparent as possible. For this reason, critical discussion of musical works is often directed at scores and the notation they employ, bypassing the mediation device—­the performance—­ altogether. The fact that the scrutiny of a score is taken to simply be the scrutiny of a musical work is a standing condition behind much Western art-­ music pedagogy and musical analysis. The musical work, usually the product of a single creative agent (the composer),therefore occupies a central place in discourse about the value and interest of music, even though it has a mysterious, and still contested, status. To put it bluntly, the answer to the question, “What is a musical work?” is still open to a variety of answers, an odd state of affairs given the centrality it enjoys in musical discourse. While some philosophers of music and many cultural theorists of musical production and mediation recognize the metaphysically schizophrenic nature of the musical work, the fact that musical works are commonly thought to be the creative output of identifiable agents (again, composers) has led intellectual property law to take a stance on a number of concept-­ rich and contentious features of musical works. For musical works are protected intellectual property, and so the law needs to determine what musical works are, how they are created, and what features they have and do not have, and to take a stand on related questions, such as the relationship of 35

36  •  in ten ts a n d p u r pose s

musical performances to musical works and whether musical works are fixed or changeable, among a host of others, all with ontological import. How these questions are addressed in the law is a product of the dominant musical traditions it has considered and the dominant discourses concerning musical works that have developed around these traditions. As a matter of fact, these traditions have not foregrounded improvisation, or multiauthored works, or works not usually “fixed” via notation. In this chapter I want to look at what happens when this dominant musical tradition, with its focus on the musical work and with an assumed theory concerning what musical works are, is faced with related but distinct traditions drawing on Afrological traditions of musical production, consumption, analysis, and criticism. This will serve to motivate our subsequent investigation of other ways in which Afrological aesthetics suggests both alternatives to mainstream Eurological musical aesthetics and criticisms of this tradition. Here we will see that competing aesthetics and their accompanying ontologies of musical works and performances are behind this legal dispute, and that an Afrological aesthetic suggests a musical work ontology at odds with that employed by intellectual property law. In other words, debates about competing aesthetics and their distinct underlying ontologies are not merely academic fodder, but inform the law and affect many lives. This is one added reason to pursue issues in the ontology of music: they are not just of conceptual import. Future chapters will investigate other features of such an Afrological aesthetic, and what sort of ontology of music is best seen as consistent with this tradition. Intellectual property law, particularly concerning copyright, is therefore a fertile site for teasing out the metaphysics of musical works operative in the dominant culture, and for showing how the metaphysics assumed has ramifications both aesthetic and social. If one needs convincing that an interrogation of the musical work concept is of more than just “pure” philosophical interest, a consideration of the role this concept plays in intellectual property law should do the trick. For cases involving music copyright, particularly in our postmodern age of bricolage inspired by sampling techniques, need to take a stand on what constitutes a musical work,1 and these decisions are intimately related to aesthetic evaluative judgments that the law makes (often involving the question of originality). Cultural politics are played out in such cases, many of which involve accusations of illegal appropriation of works by African American composer-­performers by white mainstream 1.  Work rights are one of the two copyrights one might obtain with music, the other being recording, or mechanical, rights.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 37

popular musicians and groups. In other words, such law, and the cases that hinge on its interpretation and application, are the most public airing of a nexus of issues concerning the metaphysics of music, the politics of music, and assorted signal issues related to race, class, gender, and property. These issues lie below the surface of legal discourse concerning music, rising only in exceptional cases, such as the one I want to concentrate on here: James Newton v. Michael Diamond et al. (aka the Beastie Boys).2 Elsewhere I have discussed this case in great detail.3 Here I want to concentrate on the notion of a musical work that informed the legal decisions made and show how it is culturally relative and seemingly at odds with the notion of the musical work—­what musical works are, what features they have, and how they come to have the features that they do—­that Newton is operating with, drawn from an Afrological aesthetics. Further features of this aesthetic, and in particular the relationships between musical works and performances that this aesthetics suggests, will be addressed in subsequent chapters. By beginning with the status of the musical work in intellectual property law, we will see that questions surrounding the aesthetics and ontology of music are not merely dry academic questions but have wide social, cultural, political, and economic implications. First, some outline of the case. James Newton is an African American flautist, composer, and bandleader who works in numerous musical genres, including jazz, classical and new music, and third-­stream traditions. He holds a professorship in the California State University system in Los Angeles. He is commonly considered to be the greatest flute virtuoso in the jazz world of his generation, having won Down Beat’s “best flautist award” for some twenty years straight. He is also an important contemporary composer. It 2.  James W. Newton, Jr. dba Janew Music, Plaintiff, v. Michael Diamond, et al., Defendants. Case No. CV 00-­04909 NM (Manx), United States District Court for the Central District of California, 204 F. Supp. 2d 1244; 2002 U.S. Dist. Lexis 10247, May 20, 2002 Decided, May 21, 2002, filed, May 22, 2002 Entered, Judge, Nora M. Manella, opinion by Nora M. Manella. More recently, the case involving the song “Blurred Lines,” by Robin Thicke and Pharrell, and Marvin Gaye’s estate hinged on what constitutes the musical work by Marvin Gaye, “Got to Give it Up.” Many who weighed in on this debate seem to assume that sheet music authoritatively establishes an answer to this question, and that the distinction, crucial to intellectual property law, of an idea vs. its fixation, is somehow clear with music and relies on the clear application of transcultural musical properties such as harmony and melody. See, for example: http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2015/03/blurred-linesur-lines-and-color-line.html and https://theconversation.com/how-the-jury-in-the-blurredlines-case-was-misled-38751 3.  Lewis, “Ontology, Originality and the Musical Work.”

38  •  in t en ts a n d p u r pose s

was brought to his attention by a student that the Beastie Boys had sampled a six-­second segment from his recorded performance of “Choir,” from his album on ECM entitled Axum,4 and looped it continuously throughout their recording of “Pass the Mic,” a song that ended up on an episode of Beavis and Butt-­Head. At the time of the original recording of “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys did seek out, and receive from ECM, the nonexclusive recording rights—­that is, the mechanical rights—­for the sample.5 ECM held the recording rights, but they failed at the time to inform, per standard practice in the recording industry, James Newton of the request.6 The Beastie Boys decided not to seek to obtain composition/work rights for the sample, owned by James Newton’s publishing house (JANEW Music, of which he is the sole owner), and so Mr. Newton, for over ten years, was never aware of the Beastie Boys’s appropriation of “Choir.” Although standard procedure for sample clearance was, and still is, rather unclear, it is usual to seek both recording and composition rights, and negotiate payment for the latter based on a rather amorphous set of criteria.7 None of this is in dispute. Mr. Newton, outraged at what he saw as an unfair and illegal appropriation of his creative activity, brought suit against the Beastie Boys, centering on the charge of copyright infringement due to their failure to clear the musical work rights. He lost, and lost again in a split decision at the appeals court. Subsequent to this, Newton appealed to the US Supreme Court, who decided not to hear the case. This set up a rather nasty and protracted debate within the music community that one cannot help but see through the lens of postcolonial cultural theory. An all-­white group, made rich playing a musical style closely identified with the African American community—­rap/hip-­hop—­countersued a relatively poor African American musical vanguardist after having appropriated his music, and so threatened his financial security. This case raises a number of interesting issues. It serves as an ideal way to demonstrate the actual interconnectedness of the metaphysical, aesthetic, and social issues that the musical work concept raises, and the degree to which these are often taken for granted. It also makes clear that such inter4.  Recorded in 1981, at which time J. Newton licensed the recording rights to ECM. 5.  These are the rights to use the actual recording itself, but do not include the right to use the underlying musical work that the recording is a record of. 6.  This failure, one should note, is not illegal. 7.  That this is standard practice seems to be a function of the inconsistent, unclear, and rapidly changing case law concerning the licensing of samples, with most record companies and recording artists taking a “rather safe than sorry” approach.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 39

relations are relative to background aesthetic theories and are parsed differently by distinct traditions of musical creation, fixation, and consumption. In addition, the case itself, from the perspective of intellectual property law, is fascinating. Concerning this case I will focus on three points. First, I will demonstrate that the court took a particular stand on what constitutes a musical work, and what, therefore, originality in music can be, and that this position is prejudicial to many of those working in non-­Western musical forms. In particular, we will see that the court, in this instance at least, clearly conceived of a musical work as exhaustively being defined by a score, and that it is exclusively melody-­harmony-­rhythm that are scored, and therefore it is solely with melody-­harmony-­rhythm that originality (and any other property of the musical work) may lie.8 Second, I argue that, appearances aside, the plaintiff was well aware of this and of what is at stake. Third, we turn to the question of why “the forces of good” (that is, those committed to a progressive politics who believe they are supporting minority musicians) from popular music studies tend to side with the Beasties, while “the forces of good” from jazz studies tend to side with Mr. Newton. This last point will demonstrate, as suggested earlier, the contested nature of many musics’ histories, and the importance of such histories to ontological issues. What I want to demonstrate here is that the court’s “definition” of what constitutes a musical work is, in effect, a simplified version of a definition common in the philosophical literature concerning musical works, and so shares the deficiencies of this definition. These philosophical accounts are all formalist in nature and are in various senses children of Eduard Hanslick’s theory as developed in his seminal Vom Musikalisch-­Schönen of 1854. To put an important point rather strongly, and perhaps contentiously, a racist and classist practice and law here attempts to hide its exclusionary nature behind a metaphysics of the musical work that purports to be objective and universal, but in fact is not. By accepting unreflectively an ontology 8.  An important and interesting issue, not to be pursued here since it was not at issue in this court case, concerns the status of originality in bricolage works, such as “Pass the Mic” and other works employing samples. For in some obvious sense, the originality of highly sample-­driven works concerns the interrelationships between the samples employed and the precise layering used. I hope this book as a whole opens up new conceptual ground for interrogating the notion of originality in works such as “Pass the Mic,” and what relationship performances and recordings that employ samples have to the works the samples are taken from. For an investigation into the legal issues that need resolution to protect sampling art forms, which hints at some of the more fundamental issues underlying the law, see Shervin Rezaie, “Play Your Part.”

40  •  in t en ts a n d p u r pose s

of music that is both a product of, and appropriate only to, a particular history of musical production, the court ends up, as a matter of law, failing to view the musical productions of artists working in other musical traditions as bearing the crucial aesthetic/evaluative property of originality. Not only does this have the legally dangerous result of failing to offer copyright protection to such works in cases where it seems such protection is called for,9 but it ends up downgrading the aesthetic value of whole categories of music whose legal credentials as interesting art now rest solely in their performances and not in the works themselves. This creates a kind of cognitive feedback loop: by conceiving of such art works as intrinsically lacking in originality, one tends to lower the standards of copyright protection one sees as appropriate for them, which itself helps support claims that they lack originality. Let us turn to the case. The judge’s confusion concerning what might constitute a musical work is evinced early on in her decision. The following passage is from the “Facts” section: Defendants represent that the sample consists of a six-­second segment in which the performer fingers a “C” above middle “C” on the flute, while singing the same “C,” ascending one-­half step to a “D-­flat,” and descending again to the “C.” {Defendants Statement of uncontroverted Facts P 6.} Plaintiff concedes that Defendants sampled “melody and harmony created by interaction of the underlying flute note of C and the simultaneous vocalization of the notes C, D-­flat, and C.” {Korn Decl., Ex. 5 Plaintiff’s Response to Defendants’ Interrogatory No. 1 n. 2} However, Plaintiff alleges that Defendants also sampled the unique musical sound and characteristics created by his distinctive performance techniques. (my italics)10 It is footnote 2 that gives the game away. Here we read that “despite this concession, Plaintiff inexplicably disputes Defendants’ proposed uncontroverted fact concerning the notes they sampled. However, he provides no description in his ‘Statement of Genuine Issues’ of the notes at issue. The portions of the record cited by Plaintiff concedes, Defendants sampled a portion of the score in which the performer fingers a ‘C’ note on the flute while singing

  9.  For musical works must be deemed original to be protected by copyright. 10.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 15.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 41

C–­D-­flat–­C” (my italics).11 Newton’s refusal to concede that C–­D-­flat–­C is an accurate description of what was sampled hinges on the Beastie Boys’s claim that this is what the sample “consists of.” While Newton admits that clearly there is an analysis of the sample such that one might reasonably describe it as “containing” C–­D-­flat–­C, he denies that this is the appropriate analysis for so describing the sample. It is an importantly incomplete description. The sample contains far more than this, and an accurate description of what was sampled must include far more than this. For this analysis, the C–­D-­flat–­C analysis, employs the language and categories of Western musical notation, and therefore assumes much else that this notation takes to be the case about what constitutes a musical work, or part of a musical work. The court’s position here is closely related to the sonicism found in the works of philosophers such as Julian Dodd12 and the often tacit assumptions made by such thinkers concerning the relationship between score-­able features of musical works, and such works’ “real” (and audible) properties. Newton believes that what constitutes a musical work is “a genuine issue of material fact” pertinent to this case. In particular, performing the piece as it is intended to be performed sets up overtones and harmonics far richer in note-­value and harmonic complexity than just C–­D-­flat–­C over a C indicates. For Newton these complex overtones and harmonics are part of the musical work, and not merely performative. Any correct performance of the work must include them.13 As the judge goes on to note when considering the legal standards concerning summary judgments—­that is, circumstances under which the court might decide there is no case to be heard, and so terminate the court proceedings—­quoting from Supreme Court decision 475 U.S. 574: “When the moving party has carried its burden under Rule 56(c), its opponent must do more than simply show that there is some metaphysical doubt as to the material facts. . . . Where the record taken as a whole could not lead a ratio11.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 77. 12.  See Dodd, Works of Music. 13.  In this context, and concerning the particular work “Choir,” Newton (or at least his defense team) accepts that musical works have strong normative features. What they deny is that norm-­making features are all necessarily notated in a score, but can be created via histories of “correct” performance. They also recognize that instrumental timbre and its associated overtone series can be parts of musical works, and so scored pitch values are not to be construed as idealized, but as including what many have considered to be “noise,” following a tradition originating perhaps with Helmholz (On the Sensations of Tone, and the section entitled “Distinction between Noise and Musical Tone”).

42  •  in t en ts a n d p u r poses

nal trier of fact to find for the non-­moving part, there is no ‘genuine issue for trial’” (my italics).14 Yet what are we to do when it is the metaphysics itself that is in doubt? Newton must demonstrate that someone other than a philosopher might take issue with the claim that the sample is “just” C–­D-­flat–­C, that a “rational trier,” a potential juror that is, might realize that there is a real question as to how to describe the content of the sample. What constitutes a musical work is what is at question here, since the issue is how to describe a particular part of a musical work, the part sampled. Newton believes that this question is a genuine issue of material fact, and that is what the judge seems not to recognize. In other words, the court lambastes Newton for mere metaphysical speculation about the content of the sample, while the court itself takes, unreflectively, a metaphysical position on this very same question. It is a classic case of how a dominant viewpoint on a contentious issue—­here what are the pertinent parts of a musical work—­is presented as if it is “natural” and not in fact theory-­driven, while competing opinions are seen as pandering to inappropriate theoretical speculation. For it is clear that the passage under dispute when performed contains sonic information far richer than C–­D-flat–­C alone indicates (as, say, C–­D-flat–­C would sound if produced as pure sine tones lacking any partial harmonics). So, which subset of this rich sonic event corresponds to the part of the musical work associated with this passage is the question, and answering this is a highly theoretically contentious endeavor, striking at the heart of a nexus of issues in the ontology of the musical work and pointing toward how distinct musical traditions may answer this question differently. A closely related issue is what constitutes a “rational trier of fact,” for standards of rationality are relative to cultures and practices. Is it rational to describe, analyze, or hear the sample as only containing C–­D-­flat—­C? Well yes, perhaps, in a Western music theory class as taught at McGill, but perhaps not if taught, say, by Wadada Leo Smith at California Institute of the Arts or, crucially, as taught by James Newton at California State, L.A. More to the point, it may be rational to so describe the sample were it to have been taken from, say, an eighteenth-­century French sonata, but not given the fact that it is part of a composition by James Newton, a twentieth-­ and twenty-­first-­century composer with avant-­garde credentials working in a compositional tradition, for all its hybrid elements, strongly rooted in African diasporic traditions. That is to say, what one hears in a passage of music, 14.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 24.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 43

and how one might describe what one hears, is highly culturally dependent. The point is not that, say, the meanings one attributes to a given passage, or what one takes the passage to express, are culturally dependent (they surely are), but even what “pure” sonic features one takes a passage of music to contain is a function of, among other things, what kind of notation one employs, and even whether or not one employs notation at all.15 What we “simply hear” is no more obvious than what we “simply see,” and any particular answer to this question assumes a particular account of perception, cognition, and property ontology. In addition, the notion of “rationality” at play here cannot be cleaved off from what one takes the proper analysis of musical works to be. And so the notion of rationality operative here is itself intertwined with the acceptance of a given ontology of the musical work; there is no “view from nowhere” from which to make this judgment. How the law hears is as culturally embedded as how each of us hears. This point is intimately related to what one takes a musical work to be, for the following reason. A musical work, as commonly considered (and as considered by intellectual property law) is some sort of entity distinct both from a composition intended to produce performances of the work (and that is thought to capture, via notation, the essential sonic features of the work) and from any given performance of the work.16 Musical works themselves are epistemically opaque, as we need to infer their features from what we have access to, scores and performances, and this inference needs to be guided by theory, since musical works are thought to have features other than those of scores (which are often just marks on paper) and not to share all features of their performances (which often include fluffed notes and the like). Since scores are instructions for producing performances of musical works, and scores employ, by definition, some sort of notation (they are symbol systems), the dominant view holds that one’s notation must include 15.  See S. Davies, Musical Works and Performances, especially Chapters Two and Three, for an astute account of the lack of “sonic objectivity” that many formal features of musical structures enjoy. Even if we interpret the question as being limited to what the sample contains qua work elements, we are left with an equally culturally relative situation. Melody-­harmony-­ rhythm may be thought to exhaust the sonic features of a musical work for some community of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century European composers, but not for composers from other traditions. 16.  The “commonly considered” is here intended to pick out what I take to be the prevalent opinion on this question among Western music consumers, whose views are highly influenced by the critical, terminological, and theoretical discourse developed to discuss Western classical music. Those brought up on bricolage musics, often digitally distributed, may not share this intuition; see Born, “On Musical Mediation.”

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symbols for all that is essential to a musical work, and whatever it does not notate cannot be essential, otherwise the composition could not capture what is essential.17 This may not be a problem if the creator/composer of a musical work also determines what notational system to employ, or is who determines what conclusions to draw about what is essential to a given work given the choice of a notational system. But that is not here, or normally, the case. The ubiquity of Western musical notation has had a pernicious effect on what musical works are taken to be, for notation has morphed from a method that attempts to capture the essence of a work (and does so to varying degrees of success) to one that fixes the essence.18 This is somewhat strange, given that Western art music has moved away from such an essence-­fixing view of a score (if it ever actually embraced such a notion), since such a notion is at odds with many movements in twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century composition, from Fluxus-­inspired works to those in the post-­Cagean tradition. Analytic philosophers’ general refusal to recognize this is a function of, I hypothesize, the tremendous influence of Nelson Goodman’s account of a musical work as found in The Languages of Art.19 This work, for all the criticism it has faced, casts a long shadow on contemporary accounts of the musical work and is the philosophical model behind the conception of a work that informs the court decision at hand. If notation determines a work’s identity as opposed to attempting (imperfectly) to capture the essence of a work, then problems ensue and issues of notation becomes issues concerning the nature of a musical work. That the nature of a musical work is at the heart of this case, and that a particular notion of it is being contested here, is made dramatically clear when the judge states (following Nimmer and Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright), “a musical composition consists of rhythm, harmony, and melody, and it is from these elements that originality is to be determined.”20 I think it is important to note that the judge is not here drawing on judicial precedent, but on an accepted (legal) authority on copyright.21 Here we see clearly the 17.  Ignoring, for the time being, the status of implicit instructions, such as playing the instrument in the standard accepted manner. 18.  Both notions of a score presuppose that musical works have fixed essences, which are either being accessed via notation, or created by it. 19. Goodman, Languages of Art. 20.  Op. cit., quoted in Newton v. Diamond, para. 33. 21.  Here the judge talks not of works, but of compositions, for “work” is a legal term with many meanings. What is clear is that the court endorses the claim that it is the composition

What Does the Law Hear?  • 45

precise manner in which originality in music is said to depend on a particular account of the ontology of the musical work. Yet this is a spectacular bit of unargued-­for speculation, and one that encodes a particularly narrow theory of composition, a kind of musical “formalism lite.” Where does this “definition” come from, which should, I think, be rejected nowadays by all but the strictest followers of Hanslick? Why think that these three admittedly often important “sound parameters” exhaust what musical compositions consists of?22 In particular, why think this if you also believe that “a musical composition captures an artist’s music in written form”?23 For this is a quote from this legal decision—­in fact it is the very next sentence. Now the conflict is clear. Surely no one can plausibly think that music per se is exhausted by the notions of rhythm, harmony, and melody (even if we could agree on what these are); not even the most committed modernist formalist believes this. For remember, and it is odd that one often has to be reminded of this, music is sound, and scores do not sound. A score that determines melody, harmony, and rhythm alone is no more music than a blueprint of my home is a house.24 Nor would following a score without following additional tacit and culturally relative instructions produce a performance of the associated work, or even produce any sound at all.25 Part of the problem follows directly from equating, even if it is only at the level of terminology, the musical work with a composition. For a certain Eurocentric compositional practice does, basically, compose with melody, harmony, and rhythm and little else. Yet, so what? Much music that is clearly part of the European high-­art tradition does not treat melody-­harmony-­rhythm that determines the work, and so any claim about what determines a composition is, at the same time, a claim about what determines a work. 22.  Calling them “sound parameters” may overstate their objective character. Rhythm is, even within Western musical theory, a highly contentious notion commonly used to pick out a number of distinct sonic properties related to the temporal and dynamic patterning of sound. Harmony is of course a product of precise culturally indexed theorizing, while melody is equally always a product of an interpretative act. 23.  Note how the notion of “capturing” is crucially distinct from the notion of “determining.” 24.  We rarely confuse, either perceptually or theoretically, paintings with what they represent, but for some reason this confusion is common when considering music. A representational theory of musical works and performances will be developed below in Chapter Five. 25.  One would have no idea how to produce a performance of many post-­1920 compositions without such information. For example: Murray Schaffer, “Epitaph for Moonlight,” 1968; Krzysztof Penderecki, “Fluorsecences for Orchestra,” 1962; Malcolm Goldstein, “The Seasons,” 1983; Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Studie II,” 1956; and any of Leo Smith’s many compositions. One can easily multiply these examples ad infinitum.

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as exhausting the set of work-­fixing properties, or even as necessarily partially composing this set.26 The judge has committed herself, so it seems, to a highly problematic Eurocentric notion of both a musical work and a musical score.27 In addition, this notion of a musical work directly entails a faulty notion of originality in music, for it requires, without supplying argument, that originality in music can only be with respect to melody-­ harmony-­rhythm.28 What has been established so far is that copyright law in music, on at least some occasions, operates with a faulty notion of the musical work and links originality to the work in a manner equally problematic. I want to suggest that the court therefore erred in its decision in the Newton case, but here, of course, one might disagree. That is to say, to have established that the court operated with faulty notions of a musical work and of originality is not sufficient to determine the justice of Newton’s position. Perhaps an even more appropriate conception of a musical work would, or should, still have it that the Beastie Boys’s appropriation was noninfringing. Let us turn to further details of the case. What needs to be established is that this excessively narrow conception of a musical work/composition is at the heart of the judge’s reasoning. First we need to partially describe what Newton does musically in the sample at hand. The sample is the introduction to the piece “Choir.” The flutist is directed by the score (via written instructions) to overblow a C, one octave above the middle C, while vocalizing in counterpoint the notes C–­D-­flat–­C. What sounds—­music—­are produced if one follows these scored instructions? The interaction between the blown and vocalized sounds produces multiphonics, and in particular, acoustically mirrored notes that move in a contrary motion to the vocalized pitches. Now, what elements of this complex musical/sonic event are parts of the musical work “Choir”? This is a crucial question to answer. Do these innovative sounds follow “naturally” or “properly” if one performs “Choir”? If so, is this sufficient to have them part of the musical work? The judge concedes in a number of places that the so-­called “Newton 26.  See again the examples referred to in the above footnote. 27.  It would be valuable to trace the history of copyright law with respect to music, which originally concerned itself only with scores, in order to see precisely how and why this history may have influenced the notion of a musical work presently at play in most Western legal traditions. 28.  Timbre, so essential to many musical traditions and their repertoire of works, is notoriously absent from this trio.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 47

technique” (the overblowing plus vocalization) employed during the sample does produce unique and innovative sounds, but claims, “regardless, Plaintiff licensed the innovative sounds created by his technique in performance to Defendants.”29 The issue is whether these sounds are part of the work, or “mere” features of the performance of the work. The judge claims they fail to appear in the composition, that is, in the registered sheet music, which is taken to be the fixation of the work.30 The key legal issue is made clear in the following: As Plaintiff’s specific techniques of performing Choir, viz., “the Newton technique”—­Newton’s practice of overblowing the “C” note to create a multiphonic sound, and his unique ability to modify the harmonic tone color—­do not appear in the musical composition, they are protected only by the copyright of the sound recording of Plaintiff’s performance of Choir, which Defendants licensed. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s copyright protects only the sound that would invariably result from playing the “C” note on the flute while singing into the flute a “C” ascending to a “D-­flat,” and descending to the “C.”31 Now it is clear that what Newton is arguing is that the musical work “Choir” contains, as a part, the “Newton technique” elements that the court admits are distinctive, regardless of what the notated score contains. What is so much at issue is not Newton’s specific technique, but the set of sounds so produced by means of this technique. Are these sounds, with all their nuanced tone color, and including the microphonics that this technique sets up, part of the work? Are they part of “Newton’s music”? It is worth noting, as a matter of fact, that the registered lead sheet does contain written instructions to overblow the C note, while vocalizing.32 What more, one might ask, does one need to do to make the resultant unique sounds part of the work?33 Where are we to draw the boundary between 29.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 79. 30.  Again, to claim that a score fixes a work need not entail that all and only scored features are proper parts of the work so fixed. 31.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 41. 32.  And so the court seems to think not only that all the features of a musical work must be found in the score itself, but, stranger still, that they must be found in the score via standard notation. 33.  Actually it is far from clear that the notion of “the sound that would invariably result from . . .” is well formed, particularly when one is considering music with complex and non-

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“mere” performative features and constitutive parts of a work? Might one not fix work features via performance, and particularly via a consistent history of performing/recording a work a certain way, and via the performative expectations that accrue from working within a certain musical tradition? For scores never alone determine the sounds produced, but operate within notational and performative cultures.34 The judge claims that “none of the compositional characteristics [of the sample]—­vocalization or three half-­steps are, individually or combined, ‘unique,’”35 and so concludes that when one talks of Newton’s “unique musical sound,” it must only be performance techniques at issue. Yet the issue, according to Newton, is that the “Newton signature” is a compositional characteristic. Again, it is worth noting as an aside that performance techniques have a long history both of being considered parts of musical works and of only being notated when they might not be obvious for the intended interpreters of the composition.36 And so we must ask, would the intended performers of this score naturally take it to instruct one to produce the “unoriginal” sounds that would “invariably” result from reading the score in as uncontextualized manner as possible, or would they assume that these instructions are instructions to produce an effect characteristic of Newton’s compositions in general, of obvious aesthetic interest, and, quite possibly, original?37 Once the court has established that the sample is just C–­D-­flat–­C, then standard performance instructions. It is even difficult to make sense of this claim concerning “standardly” composed works. What similitude would there be between “the sounds that invariably result” were both I and Zuckerman to perform a Bach violin sonata? This notion assumes a false way of distinguishing performative interpretations of scores from some sort of idealized “pure” performance of them. It assumes both that score-­reading is mechanical and algorithmic and that particular sounds always follow directly and determinately from performances based on “proper” score reading, both falsehoods. 34.  Jazz has a long history of fixing, or alternatively foregrounding the fluidity of, work features via histories of performance. As we will go on to see, performance itself is a legitimate way to create musical works. Is there not also a middle ground, where scores exist, but only partially determine work features, the others being only realized via performance? 35.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, fn. 5, para. 80. 36.  One might indicate particular instrumentation for a given work, or a particular bowing technique, or far more “odd” and nuanced criteria, such as playing certain notes by plucking the piano strings. All of these are performance instructions, but may very well be notated to ensure that certain sounds, sounds that enter into the identity of a given work, are produced. 37.  Again, the court is taking a nonsensical position with respect to score reading. It is allowing score reading to involve enough interpretation to allow some sounds to actually be produced, but not enough to allow the intended sounds to be produced.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 49

it fails to be protectable since it is, in effect, a trivial musical element, neither original per se nor important to the (unique) work “Choir” as a whole. “Copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original and non-­trivial,”38 claims the judge, citing Rogers v. Koons.39 However, the judge also notes that in assessing originality, courts must be mindful of the commonality of many themes in popular music. This is, in effect, a plea to be mindful of the criteria of originality internal to a given musical genre, that is, to consider community-­relative ontology. If one is to stretch the melody-­harmony-­rhythm essence-­fixing model this way, why not in other ways so that it can account for the obvious distinctiveness of certain works drawn from (often) non-­Western musical traditions? Newton is clearly drawing on a long tradition in jazz of fixing works via a combination of written scores and performative examples. In such cases, the score, often merely a lead sheet, does not function as the sole source of all work-­fixing properties.40 As the plaintiff contends, the performance represents “Newton’s desired interpretation of the score.” The court does not seem to contest that this is a fair assessment of the function of the performance, and if so, might not “desired interpretations” be work fixing?41 That is to say, if a composer of a work desires one to play it a certain way, might it not be 38.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 46. 39.  Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992). 40.  Examples of this practice abound in jazz, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis being two obvious examples of composers who used more than scores to identify their musical works/ compositions. Indeed, Mingus often shunned scores altogether, preferring to teach his band complex compositions by example, often from the piano. Such examples are easily multiplied, and come close to being the norm. 41. The notion of “desired interpretation” is built into any claim that one can judge whether some set of sounds (a performance) realizes a score. If I read a Bach score totally “incorrectly,” that is, if I do not employ “the desired interpretation of the score” (even if this is a family of desired interpretations), then I do not realize the work in my performance. Of course “desired interpretations” may be quite broad, or, equally, quite narrow, and indeed we might choose not always to privilege the composer’s desires in judgments made concerning whether or not a given work has been realized in performance (they may seem quixotic, arbitrary, or simply not in keeping with prevalent standards of work instantiation). In other words, we may default to an account of work instantiation that is strongly indexed to both histories of accepted interpretations and current practice. And, of course, we may simply disagree (is Switched on Bach Bach?), or change our minds. These debates can get quite heated—­ witness the venom with which the “original instruments” debates concerning Western classical music are often conducted. What counts as an acceptable interpretation of a score, as a performance that instances the work, is indexed to a given community, and these community standards constantly change.

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because the work at issue is only realized by being played this way, and so contains, as parts, the sonic elements that result from this manner of playing?42 Is not performance a legitimate way of indicating the prescriptive features of one’s composition, and perhaps the only way when notation is unable to play this function? And, may this not take us very far from melody-­harmony-­ rhythm? If the sounds that would “invariably result” from following a score, as the court puts it, are banal, might not the performance history of the piece, particularly when performed by the composer, fix the precise manner in which the score is intended to be read, particularly if this performance history regularly fails to produce banalities, but instead instances great originality? And what if one adds to this the fact that to many within the musical community for whom this score is most obviously intended, the “correct” way to read the score, and so the “correct” sounds to produce, would be clear? After all, Bach’s cello works do not tell one to play the cello with the strung side of the bow, or to not fill the cello with water (to do so would produce different sounds, perhaps unique and original sounds—­and there are works that instruct one to do just this), but someone unfamiliar with Western instrumentation and standard performance practices might not know this. Even if desired interpretations are not always work-­fixing to the exclusion of other interpretations, it is difficult to argue that such interpretations are not work-­fixing in some privileged sense. It behooves the court to argue that in this case the desired interpretation was not work-­fixing, for when the desired interpretation is not easily notated, performance is the most obvious manner with which to fix the interpretation.43 The complexity of the issues here can be made clear by considering the following (partial) composition, by the present author, intended for perfor42.  Might not the composer’s desire to play it “this” way be the reason why the work has these properties, which are only made manifest via such performative methods? 43.  This is often the case with contemporary art music, where, even with the use of copious nonstandard notation, without additional guidance from the composer (often also the conductor, for this very reason) there would be no way for the musicians to realize the work. Gracyk (Rhythm and Noise) has argued that with much rock and pop music, the master recording is the only work-­fixing “document,” and so such works are ontologically maximally thick and include far more than melody-­harmony-­rhythm. They are also therefore fixed by performance/interpretation (along with technological assistance), and not by scores alone. It is also worth noting that one can register a musical work via a recording, and not via sheet music. What would the court have extracted from the part of Axum at issue, if they only had the recording as a record of the underlying work? Would now the distinctive and original features—­called the Newton technique—­suddenly have transformed from being (merely) performative to being part of the work?

What Does the Law Hear?  • 51

Excerpt of graphic score, untitled, by E. Lewis

mance by a large Montreal-­based ensemble specializing in graphic scores. What if one was to sample ALL of a given recording of this work, and release it? If you obtain the mechanical rights alone, would you be in the clear? That is to say, would you also need to clear the composition rights? Surely you would need to, for if the musical work is not present in a performance of the work itself, that is, a performance that both intends to be a performance of this work, and succeeds by whatever are the appropriate criteria, then where is it present? But no analysis of this work just in terms of melody-­ harmony-­rhythm can possibly be of help here; indeed, by these criteria there may be no work at all! It is only if you endorse, à la Nelson Goodman,44 the 44.  Goodman, in his influential Languages of Art, argued that one should always be able to reproduce the score of a work from performances of it, and tell just via score-­reading if a

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extreme view that one should always be able to recover a score from a performance of a work that you might want to question whether or not there is a musical work in this case. But such a view is untenable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that much that we naturally would take to be examples of musical works ends up being denied this status, and virtually everything that we take to be examples of performances of musical works ends up not being what they most manifestly seem to be.45 In effect, this court is endorsing Goodman’s untenable position, by not allowing features that are unscoreable in the Goodmanian sense to be work-­fixing. The court’s confusion (matters of law aside) as to the claim the plaintiff is making concerning “where” the innovation lies—­only in a given performance (the court’s view), vs. in the work (the plaintiff’s view)—­is made clear in the following exchange. The plaintiff’s expert witness Oliver Wilson claims “that Plaintiff is not simply using a technique that is common in contemporary musical practice, but rather creating a specific musical event in the composition Choir that reflects his specific artistic vision.”46 The judge claims that what follows from this is that “any originality of the sample comes from Plaintiff’s particular performance techniques, which are not at issue in this litigation.”47 Again, point of law aside, the claim Mr. Wilson is making is that the unique elements of the sample are “specific musical events in the composition,”48 and not “merely” performative. They may enter into the composition via performance-­based instructions, but that is true for much that is taken to be a musical work in the history of jazz, and for that matter, in many musical traditions. It is not (just) the technique that is unique, but the sounds so produced. The court seems to realize this, for it claims there is originality in the sample, and the sample after all is just sounds, not techniques. What can be learned from considering “public opinion” concerning this case? A rather unscientific perusal of blogs and the like does discern a split in opinion, mirrored in the opinions of music scholars, which seems to track, perhaps curiously, where one’s aesthetic allegiances lie. Fans and scholars of popular music seem to tend to side with the Beasties, while jazz fans performance is of a given work. He also has a very quixotic and narrow conception of what a score can be, which places even further limitations on what he thinks a musical work can be. 45.  Since most performances fail to comply perfectly with the scores they are following, you could not move from performance to score. 46.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 56. 47.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 56. 48.  Op. cit., Newton v. Diamond, para. 56.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 53

and scholars side with Newton. This may be because many from the world of popular music studies are concerned to protect the recently emergent music of rap and hip-­hop, which rely heavily on samples. They take as their cause célèbre Biz Markie’s 1991 trial for sampling Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).”49 Here the court claimed that Biz Markie’s appropriation amounted to stealing and recommended criminal prosecution under section 506 of the Copyright Act. Such a concern for the flourishing of sample-­driven music has many believing that either all samples should be freely available or that a system of mandatory fees, similar to those paid for performance rights, should be instituted, and that these fees should be low. Such desires may have a political element. In a nutshell, given that hip-­hop and rap are musics dominated by African Americans, by making samples easily and cheaply available, one would be helping this African American art form flourish. Those who are sensitive, as many in popular music studies clearly are, to histories of the oppression of the art produced by assorted minority communities could very well view their “free the sample” opinions, and so their siding with the Beasties, as an instance of the kind of political aesthetics that someone like bell hooks has so cogently advocated, a politics of art that does what it can to help minority arts flourish.50 Those from jazz studies are, I believe, both more cognizant of hip-­hop and rap’s embeddedness in a music industry that has not been particularly fair to black artists (among others), and are accordingly suspicious of proposals to change laws toward greater free use in an area where historically black performers and composers have been on the wrong end of musical appropriation with very little, if any, financial recompense or much cultural recognition. With the standard history of jazz having Benny Goodman as the King of Swing, Glenn Miller’s band as the “World’s Greatest,” the all-­ white Original Dixieland Jazz Band credited with “inventing jazz” (and the list goes on), it comes as no surprise that such scholars question the wisdom of opening up samples to all, now that black popular music artists finally have some financial clout. With the rise of the popularity of hip-­hop among white youth, and the predominance of samples taken from older black jazz, funk, and rhythm and blues artists, it is hard not to see the loosening of copyright protections as simply making it easier for next generation’s white rappers to appropriate from blacks, and now legally deny them recompense after simply having refused to follow the law for so long. Perhaps jazz schol49.  Grand Upright v. Warner 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991). 50.  See, for example, hooks, Art on My Mind.

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ars are more aware of, or simply more moved by, the histories of musical production and theft, than are many popular music scholars. Popular music scholars tend to view the present with an eye toward a (hopefully more egalitarian) future, in sympathy with the futurist credo of much popular music. Jazz scholars tend to view the present with an eye toward a repressive and racist past, perhaps in sympathy with the essentially historical nature of the signifying trope seen by many as important to African diasporic musics, and Afrological aesthetics more generally.51 Related to this, many in popular music studies view the weakening of copyright with respect to musical works as primarily undercutting the power and finances of record labels, who are often viewed as the enemy. They see record companies as the main proponents behind copyright. Many in jazz studies focus on the financial harm they see being done to individual artists by the weakening of copyright protection. I have heard many a hip-­hop artist and scholar talk about “putting it to the man” by either ignoring or changing existing copyright law, where “the man” is taken to be the record company executive. However, those in jazz studies worry that “the man” having it “put to” may well be James Brown, Mavis Stables, or Charles Mingus, and not simply some besuited executive.52 Let me conclude with another suggestion as to what may ground this difference. I suggest that radically different ways of conceiving of musical works may be at play. It is still commonplace in popular music studies to both operate, perhaps unconsciously, with what is basically a nineteenth-­century conception of a musical work and its parts, and to curiously buy into criticisms of popular works advocated by theorists operating with precisely such 51.  These comments are undoubtedly too general to stick as they stand. I leave it to others to investigate more carefully the sociology of the reception of this and related cases among music scholars and fans. A fuller investigation of this would need to also examine the seemingly competing aesthetics and politics at play between hip-­hop and jazz, and the widely disparate cultural and economic capital these two art forms enjoy. 52.  This is not to say that jazz musicians have had an unproblematic relationship with record companies over matters artistic, financial, and related to copyright. They have not. There are other ways to start to explain the theoretical differences that tend to parse popular music scholars from jazz scholars, and the ground here is constantly shifting and maturing. Many jazz scholars during the early period of the development of rap downgraded its aesthetic value (and so saw little reason to want to support its methods, including sampling), seeing it as a poor cousin to a black-­arts movement use of jazz poetry. While this hostility or ambivalence to rap by jazz scholars has abated, as hybrid musical practices have flourished, it has not disappeared. See, for example, Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant, which denigrates the artistic status of rap in an otherwise excellent and important book.

What Does the Law Hear?  • 55

a formalist model. For much that is still written on popular music accepts the very melody-­harmony-­rhythm account of the essence of a work that we have seen is so problematic. If one applies this model to popular works, as is certainly commonplace in the popular musical press, one ends up concluding that the language of hooks, choruses, beats, background vocals, and so on is appropriate for dissecting all popular works and should be the accepted mereology of popular music. However, and here is the key, when such a taxonomy is employed when thinking about sampling, such parts end up being ranked from a perspective of their relative importance, just the sort of dissection that someone like Adorno used to demonstrate the aesthetic barrenness of popular music.53 Consider the following suggestion found in an article by Neela Kartha: “The compulsory license [for samples] would be structured in a four tier fee schedule for digital samples. If the hook is used (including the lyrics), this would lead to a premium fee, and the fee would decrease with the amount used as follows: words of lead singer; words of background vocals; instrumental melody; and for the smallest fee—­rhythm and non-­essential instrumental components (like a horn or drum riff).”54 It is curious how, given this proposal, many of the most heavily sampled sources, from James Brown’s horn section through Bootsy Collins’s bass lines, would command only the smallest fees.55 And imagine telling, say, the percussionist that they are “non-­ essential”! But more importantly, this method of carving up a work like a cow and charging less for what is identified as offal as opposed to prime is to buy in completely to the Adornian critique of popular music and the Eurocentric musical taxonomy that goes along with it. In fact, it makes no sense for the sampling of works that are not from the pop/rock tradition. Could you possibly imagine a jazz performer or scholar advocating such a position? Does “Choir” have a hook? And, if one were forced to literally parse “Choir” in this manner, would not the sample taken correspond most closely to the hook? Yet are not the formalists who advocated this particular style of musical work dissection, particularly when applied to late nineteenth and early twentieth century music, also the very same theorists who often claimed that the mark of serious music is that the part contains and suggests the whole, as does the whole the part? A musical work is not, in this sense, a 53.  See Adorno, “On Popular Music.” 54.  Kartha, “Digital Sampling.” 55.  Even though such lines are taken to be characteristically identifying of such individual works in particular, and such styles of music in general.

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sum of parts, but a unified whole. It is only works as wholes that can, to employ influential Adornian language, aspire to autonomy. Critics such as Adorno found the “collection of unrelated parts” model of popular music to be true, justifying why popular music is of no aesthetic interest. That is to say, they viewed popular music, especially jazz, as merely a collection of predigested musical parts. To embrace bricolage as an aesthetic, as many postmodern music theorists and practitioners have done, is not necessarily to embrace the mereology of formalism’s critique of popular music. To think so is to confuse a distinctive aesthetic theory with a repressive Eurocentric musical taxonomy that perpetuates the fetishism of extended musical form. Popular music scholars, who often have Marxist training and/or sympathies, may perhaps unconsciously buy into the Marxist-­inspired Frankfurt School account of musical parts. On the other hand, it is standard for jazz scholars, many operating with a distinct ontology and taxonomy of music coming out of a theory of signifying, to refuse to view jazz works as merely “low-­art” versions of European high-­art music. I hope to have demonstrated that copyright law needs to reconsider its conception of a musical work. To continue to consider it as a sort of virtual score is to continue to embrace a metaphysically faulty account of musical parts and a culturally imperialistic account of musical production. We have seen, in a concrete way, the intimate intermingling of matters ontological, aesthetic, and political that intellectual property law both manifests and helps reveal. What should also be clear is that questions surrounding the ontology of the musical work, far from being either dead or of purely philosophical interest, are very much alive and kicking. If the courts employ the work concept in a particularly unnuanced way, what are the alternatives? The following chapters suggest what an alternative might look like, one that considers the practices, discourses, and traditions of jazz and related improvised musics.

Two

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation From Machines to the Imaginary

One of the many points of contention in the Newton case discussed in the previous chapter concerned the conflicting accounts of just what intentions were behind Newton’s decisions about what to score and how to score it, and how these intentional acts may relate to questions of work creation and originality. While much of the court proceedings concerned attempts to interrogate the various parties about their intentions, this was done against a backdrop of assumptions about both what the content of intentions should be in musical work-­creating practices, and how they need to be discharged if one is to have intentionally engaged in such a practice. This backdrop was shown to be grounded in a very culturally specific account of musical works and their identity and creation conditions. We saw how Afrological practices throw a number of these assumptions into doubt, for they operate at odds with these culturally specific conventions. What follows investigates some of the ways in which intentions—­having them or attributing of them to others—­enter into music-­making and reception practices. For, as we shall see, different kinds of intentions, and assumptions about them, may be at play in highly score-­driven musical practices emerging out of the Western art-­music tradition on the one hand, and in more improvisatory music-­making practices operating in an Afrological context on the other. These intentions include those that performers may have in the act of producing music, their assumptions concerning the intentions of their fellow performers, and similarly, the intentions that audience members may attribute to performers. All of these intentions (among others, 57

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as we will see) may affect both our beliefs and the facts of the matter1 (when and if these two can, or should, be distinguished) concerning the ontological status of musical events, such as whether a given work has been performed, or whether a collective improvisation has taken place. In particular, we need to ask what sort of intentions need to be at play, or perhaps are just necessary to be believed at play, in collective improvisations, and how approaching this question from an Afrological perspective that foregrounds personal voice and sound, and that believes improvisation is a highly intentional activity (as opposed to an aleatory one) often serving to mediate information about the improvisers themselves—­be it expressive states, history, or personal narratives—­might help us think more carefully about intentionality in music-­making. Such an enquiry will reveal both similarities and differences between strongly improvisatory and nonimprovisatory musical practices, along with features concerning agency in music-­ making that may well be surprising. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the role of intentions in music-­making, if only because the nature, status, and role of intentions more generally is a subject of vexing philosophical and psychological difficulty. Some may find the taxonomy of intentions that follows to be wanting. However, a total theory of intentions must account, I claim, for the range of music-­making activities described below, and cannot run them together. The main categories of intentions that will be shown to be at play are as follows (and it is here that further, or perhaps different, divisions may be best suited for some future global account of intentions):

1. Intentions consciously held, that is, those that an agent would ascribe to an account of their actions, and that may well have been actively considered prior to acting. 2. Intentions not consciously held, but that we are justified in attributing to an agent (for a variety of reasons, some discussed below). 3. Intentions we attribute to agents without necessarily concluding anything about the content of their mental lives—­that is, intentions that follow from a description of an action itself and the situation it is part of, independent of any facts about the agent.

1.  By this claim I do not intend to endorse a strong realist position about all things related to musical ontology, but the far weaker claim that the way we parse intentions in music-­ making practices often goes a long way toward establishing commonly held (not just individually held) beliefs about the ontological import of such practices.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 59

A crude way to parse these distinctions is to note that sometimes we are concerned with what agents actually believe, and at other times we are just interested in what we are justified in taking to be the case that they believe. Disputes about what sort of musical entity might be on the scene—­ for example, a performance or an original work—­may reduce to disputes about what intentions we are justified in assuming to be at play, regardless of whether or not these justified assumptions match the intentions actually involved. One way of seeing the importance of intentions and agency for these issues is to begin by considering the role they play in the creation of music simpliciter, prior to looking to particular kinds of music, be they genres or broader categories such as composed vs. improvised. The philosopher Jerrold Levinson sees intentions as playing a crucial role in whether some sounds constitute music. Levinson sees music as having the following characteristics:

1. Music has limited essential characteristics, just temporal structure and audibility. 2. Music must be the product of human intentional action; it is sounds organized by a human.2 3. It is cross-­culturally applicable. 4. Music creators have normative powers, because their intentions fix whether or not their sonic productions constitute music, that is, whether or not the sounds they produce are to be interacted with in particular ways.3

Let us avoid obvious criticisms of these criteria, each of which can be, and has been, objected to. I want to focus on a hitherto unrecognized assumption in, and resultant problems with, this account. For Levinson, for sounds to constitute music they must have been intended by their producers to constitute music. Let us bracket the question of what the precise content of this intention must be; for example, I will ignore issues that might arise concerning cultures that may not have a concept of music per se, and the more fundamental question concerning what intentions are. Instead, I want 2.  Levinson is committed to music having to be the product of human activity. Whether this is because he thinks only humans can manifest the appropriate intentionality, or because he believes for some other reason that music is essentially a human enterprise, is unclear. He allows that perhaps all that is needed is “an intelligent being” (“The Concept of Music,” 270). 3.  These criteria are drawn from Jerrold Levinson, “The Concept of Music.”

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first to consider how the notion of “intending to produce music” is problematized once one moves to collective music-­making, say via group improvisation, and second, to show how this question becomes more complex still once one turns to the issue of machine-­generated music and machine improvisations. Examples such as these will demonstrate how we must revise the account of agency that is behind an intentionalist account of music such as Levinson’s, and show that by focusing on Afrological accounts of agency in music production, we can develop a more nuanced account of the roles that agency and intentionality play in music-­making. First I shall consider the question of intentions with regard to collectively created music, that is, group improvisation, and then turn to an extended discussion of machine improvisations. Levinson’s definition is perhaps unconsciously indexed to music with just one creator. This follows from the singular in the above clause “organized by a human” (my emphasis).4 One might think that such an account is easily expanded to cover collective improvisation by simply allowing that each improviser is responsible for his or her own musical contributions and then adding these contributions together: If sounds X are music, and sounds Y are music, then sounds (X + Y) constitute music (where each set of sounds, X and Y, are organized by distinct individuals with the appropriate intents). But collectively created music is not easily explained via such a mereological additivity principle, for such a principle fails to adequately capture the intentional nature of music, since intentionality is not additive in this sense. If a particular token of my trumpet-­playing is music, as is a particular token of your guitar-­playing, it is not the case that my trumpet-­playing coupled with your guitar-­playing is, necessarily, music—­that is, a single act of collective music-­making—­if only because my trumpet-­playing may have taken 4.  It is perhaps unclear whether Levinson is considering the creation of music to involve the performance of music, the creation of actual sounds, or the “traditional” composition of music (often a solitary activity, but certainly not always so), or both. The fact that the account is indexed to single humans suggests only acts of composing are at play, but this would, of course, be a mistake, since no music at all is created via acts of composition, if for no other reason than scores are not audible any more than architectural blueprints are habitable. It is also possible that Levinson does not intend (!) the singular to be taken literally. If so, then an account of collective intentions is needed, one that does not fall prey to the objections to follow.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 61

place early this morning, while your guitar-­playing took place during a particularly riotous party last month, and we may not even know each other.5 Similar considerations rule out as being a single unified musical event the sequential listening of two songs, perhaps from different albums and by different artists. In cases like this we have multiple instances of music, not a single unified musical event. If we are to allow music to result from the intentional actions of humans, we need to give a more careful account of intentional sound organization, particularly collective intentional sound organization, to rule out cases such as the above. If you and I engage in an improvisational duo, neither of us singly organizes the totality of the sounds produced. We do so collectively, but so do you and I in the problematic trumpet and guitar case just mentioned (perhaps unknowingly). It seems that more must be built into the intentionality criteria than the mere organization of sound. Part of my intention, and yours, must be to collectively organize sounds for a certain purpose; I must intend to organize with you the sounds we produce, and vice versa.6 It is the difference between the sounds being collectively intentionally organized (which follows simply from the mereological sum of any set of intentionally organized sounds) vs. the sounds being intentionally collectively organized (which requires that each individual intention be directed toward realizing a collective act of sound organization). Group improvisation requires mutual agreement among those participating, and this agreement involves, among other things, shared intentions. Something like this captures what improvisational musicians say again and again, that group improvisation is a collective community activity, that it is intrinsically dialogical, and that one must engage in careful listening. The ultimate insult one can hurl at improvisers, “They were not listening tonight,” may imply more than an evaluative judgment: it may be a claim that no music at all was produced, or perhaps (in the case of a duo) that there were two musical occurrences, both simultaneous, but not a single musical performance.7 Listening of the sort foregrounded in 5.  Perhaps this fusion of your guitar and my trumpet can become music, but it would require an intentional act of either a third party (who, say, taped both, and creates music from the tapes), or a distinct intentional act on our part. 6.  For a subtle and extremely interesting account of the phenomenology of such collective intent in improvised music, see Garry L. Hagberg, “Ensemble Improvisation.” 7.  We here face the difficult question of whether the intent to organize sound, singularly or collectively, in a manner so as to produce music is sufficient for the sounds produced to be so organized. The problem is this: on the one hand it may be desirable for the account of intentionality at play to entail more than simply having a raw intent in the causal chain that

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accounts of collective improvisation seems necessary for actually discharging an intention to collectively organize the sounds. Any account of music-­ making outside of the scope of Levinson’s single author/composer model, as many Afrological musics are, must employ an intentional account of music-­ making that is more complex, considering a number of distinct and perhaps not always totally parallel intentions.8 The issue here of the relationship between the presence of the “right” intent, an intent to produce music, and the actual presence of music is complicated by the fact that having an intent is not obviously sufficient for having one’s resultant actions discharge the content of that intent.9 Put more simply, intending to organize sound in a certain way does not insure that the sounds are so organized. This problem is particularly acute in cases of collective sound organization, such as group improvisation. For if one believes that, for music to result from such collective soundings, each member of the collective must intend to collectively organize the sound, the issue remains of whether or not simply having the raw intent is sufficient for the sounds to be in fact collectively organized in a manner such that a single instance of music is produced. What is needed is a more complex account of the intention to organize sound collectively. Perhaps there also needs to be the intention to listen (and the intention needs to be satisfied), the intention to have what one plays be a function (at least partially) of what one hears, or, in the extreme case, a collective agreement not to listen—­that such “nonlistening” is the guiding organizational principle.10 The intentions may also need produces the appropriate sounds. We often claim “That’s not music!” when this condition is satisfied. However, we do not want to claim that the resultant sounds need to manifest certain musicological features for the right sort of intentionality to be in play, since any such account based on what sounds are produced will be dangerously culturally indexed. Therefore, having the appropriate intentions may be only a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for music to result. We will see that certain action-­theoretic accounts of intention have it that if one does what is characteristically taken to be sufficient for “doing X intentionally” then, in fact, X is done intentionally. So if improvisers who do regularly manage to engage in collective sound organization undertake what it is that normally brings such organization about, they do succeed in intentionally collectively organizing the sound. The difficult cases involve those new to improvising, and of course coming up with an account of what it is that needs to be done to collectively organize sound. 8.  We will see that one way of parsing the differences between the intentions at play in work performance vs. those at play in collective improvisation concerns how they differ ethically. 9.  And as we shall see, conversely, not having a conscious intent “to X” need not prevent one from X-­ing intentionally. 10.  And do we want to conclude that there was no collective sound organization, and so

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 63

to be acted on in a manner such that a given community would view them as being music-­producing intentions.11 In this sense, a “success” criterion of some sort is needed for the intentions to be appropriately discharged. The problem is that one does not want such a success criterion to reduce to claiming that the intention has been successfully discharged simply if the result sounds as if there is collective sound organization, and this “sounding as if ” is determined via some sort of formal musicological analysis. With improvisations there is such a wide range of possible sounds that might result from collective intentions to organize sound that any such reduction of success to some particular set of sounds is bound to fail.12 This is not true for the intention to perform a work traditionally scored, for there how the result sounds takes one a long way toward establishing whether or not the work at hand was performed. If the sounds produced deviate too widely from the sounds that should be produced given the score, we rightly conclude that the intent to perform the score was not successfully discharged.13 There may be an important and interesting difference here between music produced by collectives performing a preexisting musical work via the reading of scores, and music produced by collective improvisations: not only are the intentions at play different, but perhaps no music produced, if one member of a large improvising ensemble was not listening, but going their own merry way? 11.  An alternative way to consider this is to decide that an intention to collectively organize sound is inauthentic if it is not accompanied by other intentions, such as to listen to others, and so on. One might go further and claim that barring obstacles, an intention, say, to listen is inauthentic if one does not in fact listen. 12.  There is likely to be a continuum of expectations of what collectively organized sound should sound like, from traditionally composed music where knowledge of score reading coupled with hearing the sounds produced should be sufficient to determine if the right intentions were discharged, to free improvisation where few conclusions about the intentions at play and their effective discharge can be drawn from merely hearing the sounds produced. Much music situates itself in a middle ground—­where there are commonly accepted, often genre-­determined, rules for what counts as sonically appropriate ways to perform a given piece. 13.  With composed music we usually have an independent way of judging what the work should sound like (the score coupled with conventions of performance), and so we can tell based on how a performance sounds if there is sufficient compliance with the score to conclude whether the appropriate intentions were discharged. If it sounds correct, we conclude the right intentions were at play—­regardless of what the actual mental states of the performers might have been. But with improvised music there are not such independent grounds for making such judgments, and so we cannot conclude simply from the sounds produced that a collective intention to produce music was discharged.

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the need for these intents to be successfully discharged for music to result, and/or for a work to be performed, may differ in each case.14 More generally, an examination of the sorts of intentional activities in which composers, performers, and improvisers engage, singly and collectively, will reveal both the similarities and differences between traditional composition and performance and improvised composition and performance; such an examination will therefore point toward a work concept that will show what these differences should be like. Crucial to any extension of the work concept to improvisation is the observation that composition and improvisation, despite being polar opposites given a certain construal of their essences, are in fact interpenetrating practices. Related to this is the often-­overlooked fact that many musician/composers closely identified with varied avant-­garde jazz movements, and therefore usually if misleadingly categorized as free improvisers, move smoothly between these two musical practices, using varied methods to generate musical structure, often within the same performance or piece.15 And, of course, a number of musical works in the Western art-­music canon began as improvisations prior to their fixation via scores, and may well call for improvisation internal to the score. What intents are at play in such mixed practices?16 Recognizing this continuum of music-­making practices problematizes attempts to distinguish improvised performances from the performance of precomposed works in anything but a very superficial manner. However, thoughts such as these point toward apparent differences between the performance of improvised music and that of precomposed music that have been understudied. If an orchestra is performing a Hayden symphony, the members of the orchestra need not engage in the sort of collective organizing and listening that improvisers must do in order to produce a performance of the symphony, and so an instance of music. True careful listening, and mod14.  Alternatively, what we take as evidence that the intentions have been discharged may differ in each case. With composed music, if the performance sounds correct, then we take it that the intentions to so perform the work were at play, and were discharged. However, with improvised music, how it sounds is often not sufficient evidence that the appropriate intentions were at play. 15.  The issue here is complicated further by the fact that much nonstandard musical notation (for example, graphic scores) builds the improvisatory into the score itself, and underdetermines our ability to judge whether the score is being followed (and so whether or not an associated intention is at play), simply from the sounds performed. 16.  See Cook, “Scripting Social Interaction.”

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 65

ification of what you play as a result of this listening, and so “robust” collective organization, is needed to produce a good performance of the symphony, but this is not needed to succeed in actually performing the symphony, and so producing unified, if flawed, music. Collective sound organization is secured via following rules as determined by the score and the conductor, apart from performer intentions. What may only have aesthetic import in the performance of composed music—­collective sound organization—­may also have ontological import with improvised music.17 This difference may be important; authors such as Nicholas Cook have argued convincingly that both so-­called improvised musics such as jazz and Western art music share improvisatory moments and dialogicality, and that both require careful coordinated listening and performance, where this coordination results in a social structure being instantiated. In all such musics, from a string quartet to a free jazz ensemble, details about this coordination and listening, and so the sort of social structure being instantiated, will have serious aesthetic ramifications. However, with highly improvised music, the absence of coordination may result in more than just an aesthetically flawed performance: it may result in no performance at all. Contrast the following two scenarios. The first concerns the members of an orchestra who are sonically isolated and physically separated from each other. They each have the score to the same musical work. Their instructions are to begin playing the score when told (say through headphones). They are given other instructions periodically via the headphones (say, instructions to modify their dynamics or tempo). All of their individual playings are mixed and broadcast, or perhaps recorded. Would we take what results to be a performance of the musical work the score of which they all played from? While we might find it somewhat odd, and perhaps note numerous aesthetic shortcomings in the performance, I suspect most would concede that the work was performed. Indeed this situation is only an extreme version of recording studio methods, where certain instrumentalists are sonically isolated from others, and physical isolation, to a degree, is also enforced. But now, imagine a group of improvisers in the same situation, being told when to start improvising and when to stop. Would we take a recording of what results 17.  One may well believe that a well-­functioning orchestra does, as a matter of fact, intentionally collectively organize the sounds they produce, but that a dysfunctional orchestra does not, while it still does perform the work at hand, and so does produce a single unified musical event.

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to be the fixation of a group improvisation? I think not; we would, rightly, take it to be the recording of a number of simultaneous solo improvisations. Consider the graphic below:

Arrows represent relations of “attention,” following scores, or listening and responding to fellow performers.



A represents the conditions sufficient for the performance of a scored work by an ensemble. B represents the conditions necessary for an aesthetically valuable performance of a scored work by an ensemble. C represents a set of nonunified improvisatory acts by a number of improvisers D represents the conditions sufficient to create a unified improvisation by a group of improvisers.

What accounts for these differences at the level of intentions? With composed music, the performers’ intentions need not be those we deem to be music-­creating intentions, for the music has already been created by the composer. It is the composer’s intentions that need to have the appropriate features, while the performer’s intention needs only to be to perform the score, that is, to actualize the composer’s intentions as symbolized via musi-

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 67

cal notation. The unification of the sounds collectively produced by a work-­ performing ensemble is largely a product of the fact that how the sounds are to be organized in a unified way is indicated by the score. And this fact has us rightly conclude that when the sounds as scored are produced, the intent to so perform the work is both present and properly discharged. Yet if I act to actualize someone else’s intentions, my intentions need not be what theirs were; I need not even be aware of their intentions. As will be discussed below, it may be the case that the performer in such cases need not be an intentional agent at all. The organization of the sound in the performance of scored music can, in a sense, be imposed from without—­initially by a composer, and then by a conductor. These intentions are mediated via scores and performers, who need not have the appropriate intentions (in the case of the performers of the score) or indeed have any intentions at all (scores do not!). Here again is a difference between composed and improvised music. I can compose a piece of music for, say, the north and west winds. This piece can only be realized by these two winds; it is their sounds that constitute the music, but they have no intention to organize sound, for they have no intentions at all.18 In this sense performers of precomposed music may lack music-­making intentions and still produce music. However, the north and west winds cannot jam, and so cannot produce music apart from some human intentional act to consider their simultaneous blowing as such. With improvised music the organization of the sound for a certain purpose is predominantly, and sometimes wholly, a product of the performers’ intentions and actions.19 And as we have seen, these intentions seem to need to be acted on appropriately for music to result from such improvising. We will return to this point at the end of the chapter. With composed music a set of instructions for the appropriate organization of sound—­the score—­standardly preexists any given performance, and this score is often the product of one person’s compositional activity.20 So, 18.  We will turn to the question of whether or not the winds are performers of such a work in the discussion of improvising computers found below. 19.  Mixed, or hybrid, methods of producing musical structure, perhaps involving graphic scores, aleatory techniques, performer-­generated rules, and so on, problematize this distinction. However, many such methods end up placing greater responsibility on performers’ decisions than canonical classical composition does, and so they often bear many of the cognitive, social and ethical hallmarks of improvisation. This account, if correct, problematizes the notion of improvisation by, or with, machines, as we will see later in this chapter. 20.  This is not to deny the complex, multiauthored history of many classical works involving transcribers, publishers, annotators, and the like.

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if an orchestra in the midst of infighting on an off night refuses to listen to each other, the sum total of the sounds they produce may still be sufficiently organized insofar as they each individually comply with the score to produce a performance, however artless, of, say, a Hayden symphony. And surely a performance of a given musical work is an instance of music if anything is. Perhaps all they need to do is start at the same time, and play with tempi and dynamics within the accepted ranges given the performative practices that they operate with (as with the thought experiment above). Even this could be done with synchronized watches, so no real listening is needed. Again, the organization of the sound necessary for music to be produced can be externally imposed. The suggestion is that an improvising ensemble needs to be in an intentionally coordinated state not only to produce an aesthetically satisfactory performance but to produce a single unified musical event at all.21 If we have here a real distinction between the performance of improvisational music and composed music, concerning the kinds of listening and interactions that the music producers must engage in and the intentions that must be present for the sounds to be organized in the appropriate way to produce music, we again can see a metaphysical impetus behind the social and ethical comments often made by many members of the improvisational community concerning the intrinsic communitarian nature of improvisation. If group improvisation is an act of collaborative sound organization, with little or no external assistance, then models of cooperation and collaboration, criteria of success and failure, and methods to bring it about and strengthen it come to the fore, and these are all essentially social and ethical concerns of the community of improvisers. The very act of music production via improvisation can therefore be seen as having a social/ethical component. When a group of people collectively discharge the intent to collectively complete a given task, we are faced with a paradigmatic example of a situation with rich political and cultural import and potential. The “hows” 21.  Another way to see this point is to consider recordings of musical works. When a recording is played, or a piece is heard on the radio, we may wonder whether we are faced with a performance of the work, but there is no question that there is an instance of the work, even though the radio or the CD player has no intentions. The difficult case concerns what to say about recordings of improvisations—­are they instances of the improvisation in any sense? This may depend on the degree to which the improvisation has taken on the status of a musical work, something that can have instances. A recording of a free improvisation may not be best heard as an instance of the improvisation but simply as a recording of it, just as a photograph of a person is not in any sense an instance of the person.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 69

and “whys” of the implementation of such a collective activity are, at their root, interpersonal issues, and so political. An important way to see this difference is to note the distinct kinds of responsibility at play in work performance vs. improvisation. If one is engaged in an act of collective sound organization, then one takes equal responsibility with all other members for the totality of the sounds produced, not just for one’s own sonic contributions. Of course, one’s collective responsibility will be discharged via one’s own contributions—­what and when you play, and when you choose not to. But one’s ethical attitude toward the sum total of what is produced—­the improvisation—­is one of shared total responsibility. This need not be the case in the performance of a scored work, as one may refuse to take responsibility for the whole, blaming the conductor or the wonky cellos for this or that. The notion of responsibility here is not the same as causal agency—­improvisers are not claiming that they are causally responsible for what their fellow improvisers did or did not do as much as they are taking a moral stance toward the total sound structure they produced—­it is of the ensemble, and so they are equally responsible for it all.22 It may well be that any music-­making may have this hallmark of the improvisatory, a collectively shared responsibility for producing musical form. Such shared responsibility may often be necessary to produce aesthetically valuable performances of works otherwise thought of as being fully composed. However it appears to be a metaphysically essential feature of improvising, not simply aesthetically valuable.23 To improvise may turn out to be more about an ethical/social attitude one takes toward music-­ making than a well-­demarcated method of sound organization per se. And the improvisatory elements of assorted music-­making practices may also accrue from the presence of such attitudes, as opposed to any particular technique or the presence or absence of a score. It may issue forth more from a particular intentional stance one takes toward one’s music-­making practices and need not simply be a musicologically defined method of sound production. This is not to say that improvising and other methods of music production are really the same, or that everything is, in any interesting sense, improvisational. It is only if you privilege at the outset traditional musicological categories that ignore intentions as being the correct means to dis22.  These thoughts are consistent with, and may actually be required by, the emergent mind model of collective improvisation as advocated by Hagberg, “Emsemble Improvisation.” 23.  I say metaphysically essential since, as a matter of historical fact, such shared responsibility may well be a crucial and omnipresent feature of many musical performance practices.

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tinguish assorted musical practices that the difference at the level of intentions seems unimportant. The point here is just the opposite—­intentions, including social/ethical attitudes, are themselves crucial in demarcating the improvisation/performance divide in a way that might actually tell us something interesting about their differences. Social/cultural differences between music-­making practices can have ontological ramifications. To commit to a responsibility for the totality of the sounds produced, and to intend to so commit, seems to be a true hallmark of the improvisatory, and it is, at its root, an ethical attitude. This also suggests considering precisely what one is listening for, or to, when improvising with others. It will not do simply to say “The sounds produced by one’s co-­improvisers,” because that is tautological. What we want to know is toward what end one is listening to them, how one is listening, what information it is that one is extracting from these sounds. To act on an intention to collectively organize sounds with one’s fellow improvisers is to in certain ways represent, process, and respond to the sounds they are producing. Yet these ways inevitably vary from improviser to improviser. For example, one need not represent, and act on, the sounds you hear by conceiving of them under formal music-­theoretic categories (although you may do so). One may focus on expressive qualities, or bodily gestures, or almost anything else. There are no a priori ways to limit what about an act of collective music-­making may or may not enter into the causal chain that results in my collective organization of the sounds with my fellow improvisers. My “sound organization” intentions and desires may have a wide variety of contents, and be directed toward assorted ends. They may, and inevitably will, vary from group to group, individual to individual, and genre to genre.24 This last fact suggests a way in which the intentionality at play with improvisations and work performances may differ. For with work performance the performers’ intentions do seem to need to be collectively unified by a desire to follow the score. This is the case whether we consider conscious intentions, or intentional contents that we infer from the performance itself. In this sense there will be similarity to the work-­performing ensemble’s intentions with greater specificity than simply the shared desire to collectively organize the sound, for the manner in which this organization is to be brought about, by following the score, is also shared. The members 24.  It is an open question in the study of music cognition whether or not we represent, and so understand, music using concepts that are not purely musical—­that is, concepts such as expressive predicates that equally apply to nonmusical and nonauditory phenomena.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 71

of an improvising ensemble can, and often will, have radically different ways to actualize their shared intention to collectively organize sound, and so the contents of their intentions in this sense differ. Considerations such as these suggest that when faced with improvisations, any account that concerns only the sound structure, or one way of conceiving of it, may not capture what is of greatest importance in fixing the identity of the improvisation, since it may fail to capture the content of the intentions to collectively organize the sound that constitute the act of improvisation. A fruitful way to tease out some of the issues just raised is to consider improvising-­machine systems, since such systems force us to face directly our beliefs concerning what sorts of intentions need to be present for certain music-­making actions to take place. This follows from the fact that it is safe to assume that most of us do not take machines to be agents with intentions, and so in this sense they are not really agents. What does the preceding account of the need for intentionality in both work performance and improvisation say about the possibility of improvising machines? Might a consideration of such machines—­the varied attitudes we take toward them and the varied ways we interact with them—­help us refine our thoughts about intentions and music-­making? At the present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—­ without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. —­Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

If intentions—­particularly intentions to enter into certain kinds of social relations and/or take a particular ethical stance—­are crucial for determining when an act of collective improvisation has taken place, then on the face of it, such acts appear to be limited to humans only. Yet the past twenty-­odd years have seen a proliferation of improvising machines, often designed by individuals well aware of the social embeddedness of improvisation. What are we to make of this dual trend in improvisational studies—­the almost contemporaneous development of improvising machines, together with the rise and maturation of theory foregrounding improvisation’s sociality? The challenge is the familiar one—­if it takes having intentions, or an ability to enter into social relations, to improvise, must you be committed to machine intelligence, or consciousness, to claim that a machine can be an improvising partner? As we shall see, many who design such improvising machines do not think that this is the question they are addressing, or even that it is the most

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pressing or interesting issue that the potential of improvising machines raises. Their interests tend to coalesce around two goals: first, to create systems that musically interact with humans in an aesthetically appropriate and compelling way, and second, to achieve this via software that explicitly models some aspect of what they take human improvisation to involve. We will have occasion to go into this in some detail, but it is worth noting—­the inconsistency is both clear and compelling—­that if machines lack the prerequisites for having intentions or being social (the combination of the two we might consider to constitute social agency), it seems difficult to claim that they can actually improvise. Considering this may help sharpen our views about intentionality in improvisation and work performance, since the manifestation of social agency requires having intentions with certain contents, where we must intend to socially interact in certain ways in order actually to do so.25 The obvious way to resolve this problem is to claim that machines can manifest the requisite intelligence/social ability (and so can have the related intentions), thereby endorsing some of the claims made by strong AI advocates on behalf of machine intelligence. It is therefore worth taking some time to present the challenge that those who deny the actuality, or even possibility, of intelligent machines raise for improvising machines. Another reason to conduct such an enquiry is the realization that improvisation may be a more fecund subject for AI than is often realized. Consider the following exchange between George Lewis, one of the leading theorists of improvisation and the creator of perhaps the best-­known improvising machine, Voyager, and one of the founders of AI, at the time a professor at MIT. Lewis begins by noting that much AI work in music has focused on creating machines that can perform from composed scores, which seemed odd to Lewis: After all, the point of AI as I saw it was to get a computer to operate in the real world. The original notion of the Turing test, as I understood it, was that to convince you that the computer was really intelligent, it had to respond to unexpected questions. . . . So I ventured the suggestion that the study of improvisation . . . . . might be more germane to the field as a whole. . . . I was surprised by his very quick, curt reply: “You can’t study that.”26 25. Anyone accidentally caught in the midst of a collective action such as a riot and charged with rioting knows of this distinction. 26.  George Lewis, “The Secret Love,” 203.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 73

More generally, the philosophers Graham Oppy and David Dowe ask, “Suppose that we have the ambition to produce an artificially intelligent entity. What tests should we take as setting the goals that putatively intelligent artificial systems should achieve?”27 I want to suggest that an ability to improvise is a reasonable and appropriate task to test for to establish intelligence. Not because an ability to improvise music is something all intelligent humans have,28 but because improvising more generally is a feature of most of our actions and, crucially, our interactions with others, and so a study of improvising systems may reveal much about intelligence per se. While intelligent agents need not be accomplished improvisers, they may well need the cognitive capacities that underlie such an ability. In this sense, a human who cannot improvise does seem to be defective, so to speak. So the study of the role of assorted cognitive acts in improvisation may shed light not just on improvisation, but on a nexus of signal issues in cognitive science related to the nature of intelligence, and on the conditions for its presence. Even if one ends up agreeing with those who state that asking whether or not improvising machines manifest intelligence is not to the point, it would still be good to have a nuanced explanation of why this might be the case, and of what precisely is at stake in asking whether or not a machine can actually be an improvising partner. We shall see how a robust investigation into improvising machine systems such as Voyager, created by George Lewis, and based on aspects of Afrological improvisatory traditions, can help us come to a richer understanding of our relationship to both the machines and humans with whom we collectively make music, whether improvised or not. For although the goal of Voyager is not to claim that strong AI has been achieved along with the creation of machines with agency and intentionality (George Lewis is neutral as to the relationship of Voyager to these issues), Voyager and similar improvising machine systems do reveal to us much about what we take intentionality in improvising contexts to be, and what assumptions and intentions we must have toward our improvising partners—­human or machine—­if we are to improvise with them effectively. I shall proceed as follows: I will present the challenge that the Chinese Room thought experiment raises for the possibility of machine intelligence, and so of improvising machines. I will supplement this critique with a discussion of Thomas Nagel’s famous paper on what it is like to be a bat, arguing 27.  Oppy and Dowe, “The Turing Test.” 28.  Although there is a sense in which this is true—­surely the ability to “play along,” no matter in how rudimentary a way, is a ubiquitous ability—­it is often not coupled with the distinct technical knowledge of how to play an instrument, and of associated musical theory.

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that this presents a related but distinct challenge to improvising machines, and more specifically, to being able to improvise with a machine. After all this, which is essentially a series of arguments against the possibility of improvising machines, I will attempt to resurrect both the interest and possibility of such improvising machines via a discussion of what is sometimes called the intentional stance, and an analysis of what it is we actually do assume or believe about our improvising partners that allows us to improvise with them. In other words, the focus will shift from what, as a matter of fact, is true about the agency of our improvising partners, to what we believe, or need to believe, is true about their agency. In the end I will develop a theory that I call “improvisational fictionalism,” which I hope can explain not only the attitude we take toward our machine improvising partners, but the one we take toward our human improvising partners. The discussion of both the intentional stance and improvisational fictionalism is powered by taking seriously the deeply personal and intentional nature of Afrological improvisation, and what follows from this concerning our assumptions and beliefs about our fellow improvisers—­regardless of their human or machine nature—­and what we therefore hear in their improvisations. In 1980, the philosopher John Searle published a paper entitled “Minds, Brains, and Programs” in the specialist journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. This paper contained his Chinese Room argument, which was already so infamous that he included long replies to his critics. It is safe to say that this is the single most influential argument in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, creating a challenge to what is called the “Strong-­AI” program that to this day continues to resonate. Perhaps the best evidence of the importance of this argument is that Searle’s critics, and there are many, cannot agree about what is wrong with his argument; that is, they cannot agree on how it may be that understanding may manifest itself in nonorganic machines, particularly so-­called Turing machines. We need not go into this argument in any great detail.29 Searle himself summarizes it very well in a 1999 paper: Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). 29.  For a concise summary of the state of play concerning the Chinese Room see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “The Chinese Room Argument,” by David Cole.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 75

Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.30 The point of the argument is that “if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”31 Now this argument is intended to show that no computer can have any understanding, here of a natural language, since all that happens is that symbols are manipulated. “Syntax cannot generate semantics” is how the point is sometimes put, and very soon one finds oneself musing over the interrelations between a number of knotty concepts: meaning, intentionality, consciousness, agency, thought, and understanding, among others. It is equally clear that the man in the room does not intend to answer questions in Chinese; he does not even know that the symbols he is manipulating are Chinese. What does this argument have to say about the possibility of improvising machines? Can a machine improvise if it lacks both understanding and intentions? Might some forms of improvisation be possible, but not others? Might this argument help us articulate more clearly the differences between improvisation and performance per se? Most generally, do we need a solution to the Chinese Room in order to make claims about the improvisatory potential of a machine? A good way into these issues is to begin by examining perhaps the best-­ known and most fully realized and theorized improvising machine, Voyager, and its offshoots, developed by George Lewis. This discussion will help us see what is at stake in claiming or denying that machines can improvise, and how we might escape the quandary of issues surrounding machine intelligence when faced with putatively improvising machines. For the precise form an improvising machine takes is strongly determined by its creator’s 30.  Searle, “The Chinese Room,” 115. 31.  Searle, “The Chinese Room,” 115.

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conception of what improvisation is, and there is a wide range of such concepts out there. Lewis’s improvising software/composition Voyager, insofar as it can produce independent streams of music, is neither merely a fancy controller or trigger nor a random generator of pitches. Lewis has written extensively about Voyager, what he thinks it is and does and is not and does not do. Yet he has also written about improvisation per se, and has articulated, in a very famous and oft-­cited article, two forms of improvisation that he calls the Afrological and the Eurological, terms that have influenced how improvisation is discussed in the literature, and that I have employed throughout this book.32 The question I want to ask is: Can Voyager improvise in an Afrological way, in light of the issues that the Chinese Room argument raises about the lack of understanding that machines have, since Afrological improvisation seems to demand “the personal,” and so seemingly a person or person-­cognate? More generally, what might Voyager tell us about what it is to improvise, and how this might differ from performance more narrowly conceived? Is it fair to claim that there is any sense in which Voyager improvises, and does an answer to this question matter? George Lewis’s Voyager software both responds to the musicians it is performing with (via an analysis of the sound sources it detects) and, crucially, produces “independent behavior that arises from its own internal processes.”33 Lewis does not claim that this software, by virtue of its independent behavior or any of its other features, is either intelligent, conscious, an intentional agent, or in any other way human. For Lewis such questions are not really to the point, because for him Voyager is about “the nature of music,” and what it reveals about our (pre)conceptions about music, performance, and other musical practices, along with how it may force us to reinterrogate these conceptions. What follows here is in many senses an attempt to fill in this promissory note—­that is, to ask what results from a reinterrogation of the concepts of improvisation, performance, and musical work in light of improvising machines such as Voyager. We shall see how such a reinterrogation does, indirectly, reveal much about intentionality and agency in improvisation, even if this is not the intention behind the creation of Voyager. Lewis claims that all musical interactions with software/hardware systems “tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture 32.  Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950.” 33.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 33.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 77

that produced them,”34 and so Voyager embodies African-­American musical and cultural practices, practices that Lewis himself is both a practitioner and a product of.35 More generally, Lewis conceives of “a performance of Voyager as multiple parallel streams of music generation, emanating from both the computers and the humans—­a nonhierarchical, improvisational, subject-­subject model of discourse, rather than a stimulus/response setup.”36 The relationship between the musician and the system is wholly sonic; the musician does not directly control the system, and the system itself will initiate musical structure either in response to, or in the absence of, other musical inputs. One thing that is rather special about Voyager is that it performs/improvises with human improvisers in, for want of a more precise terminology, a sonically appropriate way. In conversation, George once told a story of sitting in the Chicago airport while Lester Bowie, best known as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, happened to pass, just while George was playing Voyager on his laptop. George asked Lester what the audio he was playing sounded like, and Lester responded, “It sounds like a dude improvising,” and so Voyager seems to pass the Turing test for improvisation! Many who attend concerts by Voyager (including myself ) are struck by the appropriateness of its musical contributions; it certainly produces sounds in a way that a sensitive and accomplished improviser might choose to sound in a similar improvisational environment. Of course, not any sonic response to musical input coupled with the ability to self-­generate musical output is likely to strike one as an appropriate musical gesture in an improvisational setting. The software is complex, and the input data, the sounds of the live musicians, is subject to thorough analysis by Voyager. In an important passage, George explains why so much analysis is undertaken: [A]n interactive, adaptive input structure that generates a sufficiently detailed representation of its input can then produce a musical output perceptible by an improviser as analogous to various states that were experienced during improvisation. This notion of bidirectional 34.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 34. 35.  As always, we need to guard against essentializing assumptions about musical practices and influences. George Lewis moves easily and authoritatively between assorted musical styles and genres that often code as closely indexed to distinct cultural histories and histories of musical practice. 36.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 36–­37.

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transfer of intentionality through sound—­or “emotional transduction”—­ constructs performance as an intentional act embodying meaning and announcing emotional and mental intention. In this way, I believe, the emotional state of the improviser may be mirrored in the computer partner, even if the actual material played by the computer does not necessarily preserve the pitch, duration or morphological structures found in the input.37 (my emphasis) There are a number of interesting claims here. First, the software can produce sonic gestures that sound appropriate at the level of expressiveness and sound as if they are the product of the appropriate intentionality. For example, if the live musician starts playing in a manner that, given the style of improvising that is taking place, codes as deeply expressive of pain tinged with anger, then the software may well produce sounds that will equally sound as if such meaning and emotion are present, or sounds that signal a response to this expressiveness, that suggest that this expressiveness was perceived and entered into the sonic response.38 This Lewis sees as a form of “emotional transduction” via the bidirectional transfer of intentionality. Let us take stock of these claims. Lewis is careful to say that what we have here are “as ifs.” And the claim that there is a bi-­directional transfer of intentionality should also, I think, be bounded by an “as if ” modifier (which may very well be intended). This is not, of course, to diminish the interest or success of Voyager —­that such mirrored expressiveness can be accomplished with any regularity is a major software breakthrough —­but are we to conclude that Voyager is therefore able to improvise in an Afrological style, or only as if it does so. And how, if at all, might this matter? Notice how on the face of it this question is different from asking directly whether the software 37.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 38. 38.  The further a given improvisation moves from a particular genre of music, and so from a music for which there may well be musical gestures that are commonly taken to have a given expressive content, the harder it becomes to adjudicate these matters. But this is equally true for improvisations involving only humans, because the expressiveness I hear in my improvising partners’ sounds may not be those intended or those others might hear. The difficulties here are partially offset by recognizing that [I]mprovisers often develop highly individual and ensemble-­specific expressive gestures, somewhat like micro-­languages, whose expressive content may be well known by those immersed in the practice but not by others. The “anger” that many (particularly white) critics “heard,” and continue to hear, in free jazz may well not match the expressive intent of those playing it, and may be a result of failing to judge the expressiveness of the music against the intended backdrop of contextual factors which partially determine the expressiveness heard. One person’s anger may be another’s ecstatic cry, emulating those witnessed in certain black church services, for example.

Intentions, Agency, and Improvisation  • 79

is intelligent, manifests agency, and so on, questions that Lewis, perhaps quite rightly, claims are not central to the creation and performance of Voyager. To return to Lewis’s question, what does Voyager reveal about our (pre) conceptions about music, performance, and other musical practices, including improvisation? One question that emerges from this is just what Voyager does, as opposed to what does it seem to do? An important task for Lewis in creating this software was to provide the program with “its own sound,” since having a personal sound is a crucial aspect of African diasporic music-­making and is characteristic of improvisers in the Afrological tradition. Yet Lewis describes one’s sound as “an expression of personality, the assertion of agency, the assumption of responsibility and an encounter with history, memory and identity.”39 Can Voyager accomplish, contribute, or partake in any of these key aspects of having a sonic identity? If Voyager does have its own sound, but not by virtue of its sound expressing its character or identity in any robust sense, what follows from this? I will argue that systems such as Voyager reveal to us a series of assumptions we naturally make about our human coimprovisers: assumptions that have gone unrecognized yet are crucial for our ability to socialize through sound with others, both humans and their machine cognates. Lewis is well aware of the issues at play here, and he states: Even given my emphasis on the personal conception of “sound” Voyager is not asking whether machines exhibit personality or identity, but how personalities and identities become articulated through sonic behavior. Instead of asking about the value placed (by whom?) on artworks made by computers, Voyager continually refers to human expression. Rather than asking if computers can be creative and intelligent—­those qualities, again, that we seek in out mates, or at least in a good blind date—­Voyager asks us where our own creativity and intelligence might lie—­not “How do we create intelligence?” but “How do we find it?” Ultimately, the subject of Voyager is not technology or computers at all, but musicality itself.40 (my emphasis) Voyager forces us to interrogate how and why we come to attribute meaning and emotion to music, under what conditions we judge that an intelligence is behind some music production, and precisely how we respond to the sonic 39.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 37. 40.  Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 38.

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codes of our coimprovisers.41 So far as this goes, hearing Voyager as if it has personality and identity (Lewis’s “exhibiting personality and identity”) is enough, and is a great accomplishment of the software. But what are the sonic hallmarks of a sensitive improviser, such that their “sound” is judged to be redolent with meaning, history, and memory? We need to interrogate these claims further, for the interest in Voyager and other improvising machines is not exhausted by an analysis of what sounds might count as appropriate improvisatory responses, nor even by an interrogation of how and why we might hear the machine’s sounds as being meaningful, but by the fact that such machines invite us to consider, in general, under what conditions we take it that our improvising partners are doing just that—­ improvising with us. How closely do we link what we hear with assumptions we make about the producer of what we hear, whether human or machine, and how might what we hear have us question these assumptions? Even if one is a true believer in machine intelligence, it would be difficult to conclude that machines such as Voyager can improvise Afrologically by virtue of the intelligence one believes they actually manifest. For the memory and/or “personal” history that you may therefore believe machines such as Voyager may have does not seem to have the right content. It is one thing to conclude that machines such as Voyager are intelligent; it is quite another to conclude that they have personal histories that are made manifest via their improvisatory gestures. The sonic responses that machines such as Voyager make in the context of music-­making are not the product of the correct causal histories to in fact have meaning regarding personal and community narratives or previously and/or contemporaneously felt feelings and emotions. Just as randomly shaped clouds or prehistoric cave paintings cannot represent, but can only imitate, say, a steam-­engine, the music of Voyager can only seem to represent personal narratives and emotions, and so at best it can only imitate them.42 41.  The claim that Voyager concerns “how personalities and identities become articulated through sonic behavior” is in keeping with those models of improvisation that recognize that improvising is not the expression of a wholly prior self through sound, but equally the formation and articulation of the self through a sonic encounter. We do not just say who we are via improvisations but are in a constant state of becoming while improvising. Such a view is at the core of the account of improvisation found in Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation. 42.  Were we to discover a prehistoric wall painting in the shape of, say, an iPhone, we would not conclude that it is a representation of an iPhone, for to claim this we would need to conclude that its creator knew of iPhones, since representations are the products of acts intending to represent what they represent. It would simply be marks in the shape of an iPhone. Every theory of representation out there requires that there be some sort of causal

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If one rejects for reasons such as these the claim that Voyager can produce music about its own memories, feelings, and intentions, one may move to claiming that Voyager can produce music with meaning concerning not its own subjectivity but that of its creator, George Lewis.43 In this sense Voyager would be a mediation device for Lewis’s intentionality being made manifest.44 Something like this may actually take place insofar as Voyager successfully produces music bearing many of the sonic hallmarks of African diasporic improvisation (and Lewis discusses what these features are, and how they are incorporated into Voyager), but it can only happen generically, and in a manner that seems to denude the musical interactions that take place of an essential feature of the dialogicality characteristic of Afrological improvising: its immediacy and individuality. For, viewed as a sophisticated intentionality mediation device, Voyager cannot produce sounds that have as part of their meaning, say, how Lewis is feeling now, or how he is reacting to these other sounds, or how he is manifesting his agency in the moment; they can only produce sonic symbols that, at a far broader level of generality, may code as expressive of, say, African American histories and experiences (already a problematic generalization) or, more specifically, how Lewis may tend to respond in certain musical interactions. In addition, Voyager cannot respond in a way that is expressive of its own existence (i.e., as code, electronic chips, and most-­likely Chinese origin!). Again, this is not to belittle what Voyager does do and its crucial role in having us interrogate the reasons why, and the conditions under which, we do in fact correlate certain meanings to certain sounds. But perhaps the result of such introspection would be a rejection of Voyager as an improvising partner, not an embrace of it.45 If one were to reject that Voyager improvises in an Afrological style, based link, however tenuous, between the symbols said to constitute a representation of X and X itself. This is what makes representations different from mere images, and so of particular interest. 43.  This would be akin to the position (largely discredited) that the expressiveness of composed music is that of the music’s composer. 44.  Curiously, if one takes this position concerning what Voyager is, its function is very much like that of scores in cases of traditional music creation, where scores mediate the intentions of a composer that can then be made manifest by a “machine system,” that is, the performers of the score. This claim is distinct from that which identifies the subject of expressiveness as being either the music itself on the one hand or the composer on the other. 45.  This line of reasoning suggests an interesting parallel with long-­standing arguments as to whether whites can authentically play jazz, if jazz is somehow essentially a music of black experience. The position I will end up endorsing concerning improvising machines will have ramifications for this question too.

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on believing that the sonic responses it produces are not the product of the kind of understanding and intentionality that such improvising requires, one may go on to wonder whether Voyager, in any sense, improvises if it lacks such hallmarks of agency. Perhaps a human can improvise with it, but it does not improvise with the human. In another article on Voyager, “Interacting with Latter-­day Musical Automata,” Lewis reminds us that improvisation stresses the formation of individual musical personality and the harmonization of this personality with social environments, and so involves agency, social necessity, personality, difference, individual life choices, and cultural and personal location. Given all this, the structure and meaning of improvisations “arise from the analysis, generation, manipulation and transformation of sonic symbols.” The latter processes are precisely what Voyager can do, but are they sufficient for imbuing improvisations with structure and meaning? What appears to be missing, and what I want to claim is essential, is believing that the sonic symbols one is dealing with have a particular causal history, that they were produced, so to speak, in the “right way.” I will go on to argue that we need a cognate to such believing—­make-­believing—­if we are to accept machines as improvising partners. In general we give symbols the meanings we do based on making assumptions about how they came to be. Often these assumptions are automatic and correct. We give certain meanings to a painting that appears to be a Renaissance altarpiece based on its apparent iconography, since we assume it was, as a matter of fact, produced during the Renaissance by a painter familiar with the cultural codes of fifteenth-­century Florentine painters. We default to making such assumptions, even if they are incorrect, barring evidence otherwise. Context is often crucial here. If the painting is hanging in the Renaissance Painting wing of a museum, we automatically assume the painting is of the Renaissance and imbue its appearance with the appropriate meaning. If it is a painting we stumble on at a flea market, we are more wary of its provenance, and so of what meaning we might attribute to the images.46 It is precisely forgeries and other cases where the appropriate causal histories are absent that call into question the meanings we give to such paintings. One might think that robots are akin to living forgeries—­the feelings of uncanniness they often produce in us are a product of believing that the causal history behind their 46.  In other words, we often distinguish the meaning an artwork has from the meaning it appears to have. The forgery only appears to have the meaning that the original both actually and apparently has.

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gestures, behaviors, and production are not what they would be in humans, and so we radically revise the significance or meaning we give to their behavior. In this sense, improvising machines might appear to be like forgeries, or forgers, of improvisations. We assume that their sonic responses mediate or have certain meanings, since we assume they are the product of an intent on the part of the machine to express such meanings, but in fact the intent is absent; we have merely the appearance of intent. It is only if we focus exclusively on sonic behavior that we are tempted to conclude that the machine is improvising. But the tacit, and mistaken, assumption is that the behavior of responding musically in an appropriate way is due to having the appropriate improvising intentions. Improvising is a practice that results from a certain understanding of what one is doing, and if Searle is correct, that understanding is missing with machines. As we shall see, a similar understanding may well also be required to perform musical works, and if that is true, the conclusion will be that machines not only cannot improvise, but they cannot perform musical works. Yet it is worth noting the following—­improvising machines are not presented as forgeries; their creators do not con you into thinking they are actually humans. That they are machines is the locus of their interest, and no one has ever improvised with a machine falsely believing that as a matter of fact they were improvising with a human. We have freedom to consider the sonic output of a machine system in assorted ways, regardless of what beliefs we have about the causal history behind the machine’s sounds. And if the sounds they produce are given the appropriate context, we have reason to assume a given causal history, even if it is a false one.47 We will return to this point, but it is worth drawing a preliminary conclusion from this. If the right conclusion in the end is that Voyager does not in fact improvise, since improvisation is far too embedded within “an exchange of cultural and social narratives,” which Voyager cannot partake in but can only seem to partake in, it may result in a conception of Voyager that does not diminish its interest, but actually increases it. For consider what the attitude of a human improviser should be toward Voyager while “improvising” with it. One is hearing, and responding to, culturally, socially, and historically appropriate sounds, and is so tempted to ascribe to them certain meanings and a certain expressiveness. One may almost automatically do this, while at the same time believing that no such meaning and expression is actually present. One 47.  It simply may often be the case that we also have reasons not to make such an assumption.

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may find oneself oscillating between treating Voyager as a true improvising partner and so improvising with it naturally, and viewing it as an improvising zombie, inducing in one a sense of unease, of the uncanny. This may well force one to interrogate what it is to be a human, an improviser, a music maker, and so on, which is just what Lewis claims Voyager is intended to ask us to (re)consider. By realizing that Voyager is not actually improvising but only seems to do so, one comes face to face with one’s assumptions about music, agency, improvisation, and the like. In this sense it is Voyager’s “falseness” that allows it to discharge its important and interesting function. In the end you may decide there is both musical and social value in making-­ believe that there is human agency behind the sounds of the machine. For the conclusion that machine systems such as Voyager improvise neither their own personal narratives nor those of their creators does not exhaust the possibilities. As I will go on to argue, it is plausible to view them as presenting a fictional agent’s narratives, and stronger still, this is perhaps the best way to also consider our improvisations with fellow humans. By seeming to improvise with a machine, you are challenged to consider why it is you think you can improvise with anything, including fellow humans. Any argument to the effect that machines cannot improvise may very well have ramifications for whether they can perform any music at all, and giving different answers to whether a machine can improvise vs. whether it can perform preexisting musical works may well point toward important differences between improvisation and work performance. For surely one of Lewis’s intentions with Voyager is to have us interrogate our assumptions about performance more generally—­this is something Voyager accomplishes wonderfully. So we need to ask, can a machine perform a Hummel trumpet solo? Robots exist that appear to do just this. They can “read,” that is, interpret, the sheet music based on optical recognition, and force air through an actual trumpet while fingering the correct notes.48 If one is tempted to think that such robots do perform the works they appear to perform, we may be faced with an interesting result—­that machines can perform musical works, but cannot improvise. To generalize, it would appear that Turing machines can perform musical works, but not improvise them, since of necessity they lack the requisite understanding and intentions that improvising requires. The implications of this for the ontology of music, which Voyager seems to 48.  Even if such robots are not intentional agents, all the intentionality needed for work performance seems to be captured by the score’s role as a symbolic blueprint for the realization of the composer’s intentions. Performance that is therefore score-­driven may be thought to be sufficiently intentional to yield performance of the associated work. We will interrogate this claim further below.

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force us to face directly, may well be rather profound, since they suggest a difference at the level of understanding and intent between the criteria for successfully performing a work versus improvising.49 Apparently two plausible conclusions can be drawn from this discussion of improvising machines. The strong conclusion is that machines cannot improvise at all, since they cannot intend to organize sound collectively, which is a necessary condition for engaging in group improvisation. One might move to some sort of quasibehaviorist account of having an intent to organize sound collectively (although anyone moved by Searle-­like arguments is not likely to be so tempted), and claim that if a machine responds to its fellow improvisers appropriately, it does have the intent to enter into collective sound organization. Recall that improvising machines such as Voyager do seem to accomplish this Herculean task, because they can sound like convincing improvising partners, which is no easy thing! If one focuses just on the sounds produced in deciding whether or not one is faced with intentional behavior—­that is to say, if one takes a particular interpretation of the Turing test such that entities that can successfully pass such a test are entities that both act, and act intentionally—­then one would be tempted to take this behaviorist turn. Yet as we have seen, taking this turn is far from unproblematic. Chinese Room worries aside, one should note that this notion of intention is not the one that is at play with philosophers, such as Levinson, who build in an intentionality condition for the creation of either music simpliciter or musical works, since they precisely want to rule out inanimate objects from entering into such creative acts. For them, intentionality seems to be, or to require, a sort of conscious mental state that machines apparently lack, even given a behaviorist account of intentions. Yet even if one can articulate an account of intentions such that a machine can have the intentions to collectively organize sound, this would not be enough to have it that they can improvise Afrologically, since Afrological improvisation requires the improviser to possess things that machines arguably lack, such as histories, memories, community membership, responsibility, and the like. And so the weak conclusion, which seems unavoidable, is that machines cannot improvise Afrologically even if one is committed to a notion of intentionality thin enough that it allows them to be improvisers. I am not tempted by this “thin intentionality” model of machine impro49.  If a robot is performing a work from a score, we need not assume that it has the intent to do so, since we may well believe that it fails to intend anything at all. Yet if a human does the same thing, the right action theory may well have it that so producing sounds based on score reading is sufficient for intending to perform the work, regardless of the content of the conscious action-­guiding beliefs one may at the time have.

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visation, for the following reasons. One might try claiming, not that the machine intends to enter into collective sound organization, but that the sounds are nevertheless intentionally collectively organized if the actions the machine undertakes are those that, in normal circumstances, are just those undertaken in clear-­cut cases of humans intentionally organizing sound.50 One problem is to figure out what these actions are, for one might undertake a very wide range of appropriate actions while improvising, unlike with an action such as starting a car (i.e., turning the key in the ignition). So such an account must face the danger that almost any response by a computer (or a human for that matter) comes out as appropriately intentional. This is one reason why one should not move from the perception that something or someone is seeming to improvise, based solely on hearing what is happening, to the conclusion that it is or they are improvising. More important still, the reason why we may be tempted to accept a quasibehavioral account of intentional action in the starting-­the-­car case is that this is an example of learned behavior that at one time was conscious, but now is not. The thought is that it would be odd to claim that if you move from consciously attempting to start the car in the normal fashion (that is, consciously intending to start the car) to becoming so adept at it that you no longer need to form any conscious intent to so start it, that you no longer start the car intentionally. Therefore many are tempted to say that when you almost automatically enter your car early in the morning, pre-­coffee, and start it, you have started the car intentionally, even if you have not intentionally started the car; that is, you have not consciously decided to start the car. But if Searle and others are correct, the computer never was, or can be, in this state. Quasibehavioral accounts of intentional action only work for agents that can consciously intend to act in a given way, but no longer need to hold such intentions consciously to so act. In this sense a Turing test for improvising is not to the point, since it cannot be used to establish the fact of whether improvising is taking place. This is why Lewis and others rightly stress the symbolic value of the sounds produced when improvising, yet imbuing sounds with symbolic value is an ability that machines lack. For this 50.  While this is also a behavioralist criterion, it is not the same as that just considered, for the following reason: straight Turing-­test applications here would conclude that the machine acts intentionally if it acts in the manner that an intentional agent would act. The proposal here under consideration, drawn from action theory, concludes not that the machine is an intentional agent but that the sum total of the sounds produced, including those of the machine, are collectively intentionally organized, a claim that is neutral as to the intentionality any of the causal agents may or may not manifest.

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reason, I am not tempted by this “weak-­intentionality” model of machine “improvising,” and so conclude, at least provisionally, that machines cannot improvise at all.51 However, if this conclusion is correct, it does not put an end to the question of the possibility or value of improvising machines. Before addressing head-­on the question of what attitude we should take to such machines even if we think they do not improvise, we should again consider what this negative fact may have to say about the related yet distinct question of whether machines can perform music, for if they cannot improvise but can perform music, we need to know why this is the case and what it tells us about the difference between these two practices. Consider the following two fictional characters. The first, Ms. Carnegie (Hall), is a classical music lover, and knowledgeable about the traditions of classical music performance. The second, Ms. Sweet (Basil), is a lover of jazz and other improvised music, and knowledgeable of its performance traditions. They hold the following beliefs about the performance of precomposed musical works, and improvisations, respectively: Ms. Carnegie

Ms. Sweet

Sensitive to the history of classical music production and performance Foregrounds the role of interpretation in the realization of classical musical works via performance Believes that interpretation is an essential part of work performance Believes that interpretation of a musical work requires understanding of the musical work Believes that machines do not have understanding Concludes that machines CANNOT perform musical works (But) believes that improvisation is essentially aleatory and requires no understanding (there is nothing to understand) (So) believes that machines CAN improvise

Sensitive to the history of improvised music and its social functions Foregrounds the role of memory, identity, and other social constructions in improvised performance Believes that such features are essential to improvisation Believes that such features can only be the product of understanding and intentionality Believes that machines do not have understanding Concludes that machines CANNOT improvise (But) believes that the performance of scored works is wholly mechanical, follow the score and the work is performed (So) believes that machines CAN perform musical works

51.  This argument is, in essence, a restatement of Searle’s reasoning, since it claims that the behavior of the machine is not to the point, as opposed to the reasons behind the behavior.

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Ms. Carnegie has what one might think is a nuanced and essentially correct account of work performance, but an impoverished and false account of improvisation. She is well aware of the importance of the interpretation of scored works and believes that for a work to be performed it must be interpreted, and that performances are manifestations of the understanding of the musical work being performed by the performers via their interpretations of it. That is what performance is, the making public of one’s understanding of the work (or one way of doing so). She thinks this because she believes that some properties of performances necessarily issue from such an understanding—­performances can be subtle, nuanced, deep, puzzling, convoluted, and so on, because the understanding of the works by the performers can have these properties. The performance has these properties because the understandings are what they are. A performance might sound like it is subtle, but it is not if it does not issue from a subtle understanding (or perhaps the subtle performance need only reveal a certain kind of understanding, perhaps not a subtle one, but a detailed one, say). Her conclusion is that machines cannot perform works since they cannot interpret works, lacking understanding of the work. However, Ms. Carnegie has a false account of improvisation, something like a (perhaps) parody of John Cage’s account, and so she has no problem concluding that machines can improvise, since she conceives of improvisation as an essentially intention-­less practice. On the other hand, Ms. Sweet takes the position concerning improvisation argued for above, and so does not think that there can be improvising machines. However, she has no problem with machines performing works, since she believes that the performance of musical works merely requires that the score of the work be realized in the appropriate fashion. What should we conclude from this? Should we consider improvising to be just like work performance, and so conclude that machines can accomplish neither task? Or alternatively, if one believes that machines can perform musical works, should we conclude, by some sort of parity of reasoning, that they must also be able to improvise? I want to suggest that the history of discourse concerning work performance suggests either accepting a quasibehavioral account of work performance or tacitly slipping into the acceptance of one, in a manner that improvisational discourse and its strong fixation on intentionality does not. In other words, our actual practices of naming music-­making processes, and the discourses surrounding them, need to be considered as much as the metaphysics that we may think supports one interpretation of a music-­making event over another. According to their creators and much of the literature concerning them,

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a number of robots perform musical works. Toyota has created a series of humanoid-­shaped robots that play actual instruments, and so seemingly perform musical works.52 It appears that those who think that such machines are performing works are impressed that much of the causal sequence that results in music issuing from these robots is similar to that at play with human musicians. More specifically, the parts of the causal sequence that are the same or similar in each case are just those that seem to determine that a work performance is taking place. For consider that probably no one thinks that an iPod or radio is performing when it plays a song from your play­ list; they (merely) reproduce recordings of them, or broadcast performances undertaken by others. You hear the recording or broadcast of a performance via devices such as these, and if you claim you are hearing a performance, it is not because you think the small device in your pocket is performing. What is the difference? These robots operate in the following fashion: they can optically interpret an actual paper score, and translate this data (in the case of a trumpet-­playing robot) into movements of a robotic pair of lips and fingers, which physically manipulate an actual trumpet in the same manner as a human trumpet player does. In some straightforward sense the robot plays the trumpet. If a human were to play a trumpet with the apparent skill that the robot does, we would immediately conclude that they were performing the work they appear to be performing, regardless of their conscious intentions; we would take, quite rightly, their actions to be intentional, and intentionally directed at performing the musical work at hand. In other words, faced with a human engaged in a certain set of actions, we naturally and justifiably conclude that these actions collectively constitute a performance, thereby inferring that the intentional content that performances require is also present. But what about our robot? If you believe that its actions are not intentional, why might you still think it performs the work it appears to be playing? Clearly it is not just like a radio or iPod; whatever it is doing, it is not (re)producing a recording of a musical work, and so one might think performance is the only option left. One might consider moving to some notion of playing a work that is not either a performance or a recording of it. But there is a deeper reason why you might think the robot does perform the work, grounded in the late Romantic notion that a performer’s function is simply to actualize the score and to follow, as closely as possible, the composer’s 52. See video: Toyota’s Robot Quartet Band, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs_ vL9g4IYk

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intentions as to how the work should sound. Given such a view, perhaps personified most vividly by Stravinsky’s infamous belief that if one could be rid of performers altogether that would be a good thing, all the intentionality that a performance needs to manifest is mediated by the score. The intentions at play are those of the composer and are codified by a score, and as long as these are followed in the right fashion (that is, by reading the score and then manipulating instruments in the appropriate fashion), a performance of the work results. In such a view, performers still need to interpret a score, but such interpretive acts either fill in the blanks that notation cannot capture or are needed to produce performances with varied aesthetic value, but they are not needed to ensure performance of the work. According to this position, not only is machine performance possible, perhaps it is desirable, since if one could create a perfect score-­following machine it would rid one of the vicissitudes of performers. A focus on electronic composition might also tempt one toward such a view, since many concerts of tape music, which one naturally defaults to precritically thinking of as performances (you attend them at a concert hall, listen respectfully, and may find such works on programs with more traditional works being performed), are “merely” the playback of a recording.53 What I want to conclude from this is that there is a strong tradition of considering works to be performed simply by virtue of moving from score to instrument manipulation, regardless of where, or if, intentional action is at play. If this is correct, there would be at least a difference between improvisations and work performances at the level of widely accepted usage.54 The preceding account has argued that machines cannot improvise, and perhaps cannot even perform musical works. If we were to leave it at that, there could not actually be any improvising machines, unless and until such machines could manifest robust intentionality. And even this would not be enough to improvise Afrologically, which would require, in addition to act53.  Pure electronic music problematizes the notion of work performance, but any account of the ontology of electronic music needs to recognize the fact that the dominant discourse surrounding pure electronic music is that it is, or at least can be, performed. 54.  It is worth considering the status of player pianos—­do they perform works? No, if the possibility of interpretation is necessary for a performance to take place, but yes, if one foregrounds the presence of the intended instruments being played in the intended manner. Of course the status of player piano soundings is equally complex, and the point is that the question of what counts as a performance is a rather old one. I by no means claim, in these brief comments, to have adequately surveyed the discourses surrounding electronic music and the like, but only intend to demonstrate that a critical answer to these questions may be revisionist with regard to one’s precritical thinking.

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ing for reasons or intentionally, acting in such a way that personal narratives are coded in their music. Yet we have also seen that creators of putatively improvising machine systems, such as George Lewis, are well aware of the embeddedness of improvisation in the social and the intentional, and at the same time distance themselves from making any claims on behalf of their systems concerning machine intelligence. This suggests that to those deeply inculcated in research concerning improvising machines, the creation of intelligent machines is neither the goal nor even thought to be particularly important. Creators of such systems, such as Lewis, do think their systems improvise and are well aware of the degree to which improvisation is a social interaction. And so perhaps considerations of machine intelligence, agency, and intentionality are not to the point, or at least not to the point insofar as one must agree that a machine has such agency, etc., in order to consistently believe such machines improvise. And this itself suggests casting one’s net a bit wider when it comes to revealing the conceptual issues at play with such machine systems and what they may tell us about collective music-­making. This is an encouraging state of affairs, for if, before we could conclude that a given machine system can improvise, we had to solve all the issues concerning intelligent machines—­the morass of issues surrounding notions such as consciousness, intentionality, intelligence, free will, autonomy, and the like—­then we may never be in a position to make such a judgment! And so I suggest that we ask a distinct but related question: What is it that we assume or expect from our human improvising partners to take it as even possible that we might improvise with them? And what might addressing this question tell us about our putative machine-­improvising partners? It seems clear that we normally assume that our improvising partners are human—­but what does that really amount to? I do not think that most improvisers have a carefully devised set of cognitive/affective/perceptual features that they are looking for in their improvising partners; rather, they seek something far more fuzzy, something we might reduce to “humanity.” Of course there is more than a touch of the tautological in claiming that if we assume our improvising partners are humans we assume they manifest humanity, but the fuzziness of this notion reflects, I think, the actual state we find ourselves in. Few of us who improvise have strong views about free will, intentional behavior, intelligence, and the like, and so do not judge our potential improvising partners in such terms. The humanity we seek in our improvising partners is nicely captured by the claim that we expect that there is a way it is to be the one with whom we improvise, and that this way is similar but not identical to what it is like to be us. We assume that the

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sonic responses our improvising partners make are a product of their hearing our contributions and responding to them based on who they are, on what it is like to be them, and so we therefore also assume that their sonic contributions bear the hallmark of their identity, of what it is like to be them. In other words, it seems that what we demand of our improvising partners is not some carefully constructed set of cognitive capabilities per se, but the more fuzzy, and perhaps conceptually deeper, idea that there is a way that there is to be them, a notion of their subjectivity. And there are two related claims: that their subjectivity is not wholly alien to our own, so that we can come to know to some degree what it is like to be them, and that their sonic contributions to an improvisation mediate their subjectivity, and so it is via an understanding of their sounds that we can come to know something about their subjectivity. We expect what we might dub “familiar alterity” in our improvising partners.55 Does this notion that we expect there is a way it is to be our improvising partners, and that we can come to know something about this by improvising with them, help with the question of whether or not machines can improvise? Alas, on the face of it, it raises yet another obstacle, based on a famous argument by Thomas Nagel in his seminal paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” first published in the Philosophical Review and found in a great many anthologies. Nagel’s main objection is to reductionist/physicalist accounts of consciousness (at least those on the scene at the time), since he claims that consciousness entails that there is something that it is like to be the conscious agent, that consciousness implies a subjective nature of one’s experiences, and that physicalist accounts cannot, even in principle, capture this. Subjectivity is essentially linked to an individual point of view, and reductionist/physicalist accounts of consciousness (or, as it is sometimes put, “the mind”) necessarily lack such subjective specificity. Nagel’s famous example concerns attempting to imagine what it would be like to be a bat. He claims that bats are so alien to us that we cannot image this. We can imagine, so he claims, what it would be like for us to be bat-­ like, but this is not to access bat subjectivity, but only to imagine ourselves with wings, flying about at night, pursuing small insects for a meal. Let us now substitute Voyager for the bat. Voyager’s, or any computer-­based music producing system’s, means of accessing information from its environment is 55. Stressing these features of what we expect in our improvising partners is perhaps behind the critique of improvisers who seem to emulate the sound of others, and the value many improvisers place (such as George Lewis) on the development of one’s own sound—­ since one’s own sound is what can reflect one’s subjectivity.

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equally so radically different from ours that we cannot imagine what it is like to be them. It is important to note the crux of this argument, if it is correct. The conclusion to draw is not that there is no way that there is to be Voyager, only that if there is, it is inaccessible to us, even to our imagination. This raises an additional problem for those who wish to improvise with machines. For is not improvisation, insofar as it is a dialogical interaction between those improvising, an act of discovering the other, an act of coming to know what it is like to be them, to gain access to aspects of their subjectivity? The dilemma is this: one needs, so it seems, to assume both that there is some way for there to be the computer system I intend to improvise with, and that I can imagine what this way of being is, in order for me to improvise with it in anything like the manner, and for the reasons, I might choose to improvise with a human. And now we have two distinct philosophically grounded roadblocks to taking on such a stance—­the Chinese Room argument denies that there is any consciousness present in a computer, that such systems do not manifest any subjectivity, while Nagel’s argument makes matters worse by in effect claiming that even if there is machine subjectivity, it is too alien to human subjectivity for us to be able to imagine it. However, a careful consideration of Nagel’s argument, its application to the Chinese Room argument, and an investigation of the attitudes and assumptions we make about our human coimprovisers, points the way to a solution to these dilemmas. I hope now to demonstrate that we can often take the very same attitude toward our improvising machine partners as we do toward our improvising human partners, and for the very same reasons. It is important to note that Nagel’s claim that we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat is not based on the alien physiognomy of bats, it is not based on the fact they are a made out of different stuff and anatomically configured differently than we are. The inability is based on their radically different subjectivity, which may, but need not, follow from their differing bodies. We can imagine beings made up of the same stuff as us, beings that appear to be humanoids, but with radically different subjective experiences than ours, and, crucially, we can image beings with radically different bodies than us, whose inner processes unfold in physically radically different ways than ours, but whose subjective experiences are very much like ours. We may assume otherwise on meeting such creatures and so fail to realize that, as a matter of fact, we can imagine what it is like to be them. In fact, our initial assumption that their experiences must be radically different from ours, grounded in our belief (perhaps correct) that they are extremely different from us physically, might come to be undermined—­we may come to learn, by interacting with

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them, that their subjectivity is very much like our own, and that we can imagine what it is like to be them. This state of affairs is not that different from one that we may find ourselves in with respect to our fellow humans when faced with individuals from cultures other than our own. When we find others “alien,” this feeling, as ill-­informed and false (let alone racist) as it may be, often reduces to believing that differences in things such as skin tone, religion, clothing, and the like put us in Nagel’s position, that we cannot know what it is like to be them. Recall that there was a serious debate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries among white European colonialists about whether Africans and recently encountered inhabitants of the Americas had souls, which in effect is to ask whether their subjectivity is wholly alien to those asking this question (white, male, Catholic Europeans).56 How might one overcome this belief that humans who are different from us have radically different subjectivities, subjectivities we cannot imagine what it would be like to enjoy? Well, our interactions with them may suggest that our initial belief about their alienness was mistaken. Such interactions may confirm that they think about the world in various ways differently than we do, but may also confirm their deep similarities to us. If their responses to appropriate stimuli are like ours, and if the actions they undertake when faced with certain situations are similar to ours, then we may (rightly) come to be able to imagine what it is like to be them, and indeed may realize we were able to do this all along. One would assume that wants, desires, intentions, fears, likes, and beliefs just like ours inform their actions and help construct their subjectivity. Our ability to do this is limited by the range of interactions we have with them, and may well only carry over toward a certain range of activities. It allows us to predict their behavior over a certain range of situations but perhaps not others. I may realize that they too feel pain when injured, feel love for their children, and take pleasure in a sunset, but I may fail to understand their actions informed by their religious beliefs,

56.  Thoughts such as these are behind Shakespeare’s famous passage from the Merchant of Venice, where Shylock claims “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that” (act 3, scene 1, lines 58–­68). A similar sentiment informs Sojourner Truth’s famous speech of 1851, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

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for example.57 Coming to understand or imagine what it is like to be some “other” is not an all-­or-­nothing affair, and their very “otherness” may well preclude such perfect understanding, which one may not want in any case.58 Yet our interactions with improvising machines, if they respond musically appropriately via their sonic contributions, may well equally suggest the presence of a subjectivity that I can imagine. My finding their contributions appropriate, the fact that I understand their sounds and may well attribute assorted meanings and expressiveness to them, is in effect saying that I can imagine what it is like to be them in the context of making collectively improvised music. Consider this against the backdrop of the Chinese Room thought experiment. Lacking knowledge of whether there is an agent who understands Chinese in the room, if the conversation seems natural and if the responses make sense, we will naturally assume there is a human Chinese speaker producing the responses. Given this assumption, we will read into their responses motives, feelings, and intentions, and in addition come to form beliefs about their subjectivity. Our dialogical interaction with them (or the “them” we believe is present) requires that we believe that we can imagine what it is like to be them, to infer aspects of their subjectivity from their utterances. This is true even if we are mistaken and there is no agent present. Our entering into a robust dialogical interaction with another requires our belief that we can put ourselves in their shoes, that there is a way that there is to be them, and that this is at least partially accessible and familiar to us, but it merely requires the belief,not that this actually be the case. You might form a friendship with the Chinese Room and come to value its advice and your time with it, and while there would certainly be things you are mistaken about concerning your “friend,” you would be interacting with the room for all the right reasons. 57.  Coming to understand the subjectivity of others is perhaps a necessary prerequisite to empathize with them, and if improvisation is a site for coming to understand the subjectivity of others, it may also be a powerful tool for building bonds of empathy between both individuals and communities. 58. Total understanding of another’s subjectivity may rid interactions with them of all value and interest. Collective improvisation is regularly theorized as a potent site for coming to a (partial) understanding of the subjectivity of others. More generally the formation of communities between dominant cultures and minority cultures is often facilitated by participation in shared cultural and artistic events—­support of such events forms a backbone of Canadian multicultural policy—­and while there are clear limits to the ability of such cross-­ cultural activities to produce healthy multicultural societies (let alone the model of multiculturalism that is often behind such efforts), there is little doubt that such actions do help in understanding aspects of the subjectivity of those so involved.

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Recognizing this does not seem to help explain how and why we might enter an improvisatory dialogue with a machine, since, barring strange cases of dissimulation, we know when we are improvising with a machine, and we are not normally faced with a Chinese Room setup or participating in an improvisatory Turing test. Given this fact, how can we come to believe, even falsely, that we are interacting with an agent, that we are faced with a subjectivity different from, but related to, our own, if we are not taken in by dissimulation? The challenge concerns our ability to take, and the appropriateness of our taking, what is called in the philosophy of mind literature, following Daniel Dennett, “the intentional stance”—­that is, assuming intentionality on the part of some “entity,” be it a close relative, or a thermostat for that matter. In a series of influential publications Dennett discusses the conditions under which we attribute beliefs or desires (that is, aspects of subjectivity) to objects or networks, and why we do so.59 Dennett argues that as a matter of psychological fact it is often advantageous to us to treat systems that are very different from us as if they manifest intentionality. An important criterion for when it is advantageous for us to do this is when doing so has us gain predictive power regarding the future states of the system. To take the intentional stance toward something is to assume its behavior is the product of its intentionality in such a way that we can predict its future behavior. Now if a system such as Voyager contributes musically in an appropriate way, one does gain predictive power in one’s improvisations with it if one assumes that it is acting intentionally, and that the reasons it responds as it does—­its intentions—­are suitably similar to our own. Recall what Lewis states about Voyager: “This notion of bidirectional transfer of intentionality through sound—­or “emotional transduction”—­constructs performance as an intentional act embodying meaning and announcing emotional and mental intention.” And so we seem to have ample reason to take the intentional stance with respect to improvising machines such as Voyager that produce sonically appropriate contributions to collective improvisations.60 And yet one might still rightly feel resistance to treating a machine as an improvising partner. For it is one thing to treat such machines as manifesting intentionality and another to enter into a robust dialogical encounter with 59.  For Daniel Dennett on the intentional stance see Dennett, “Intentional Systems” and Dennet, The Intentional Stance. 60.  In fact our doing so will contribute to our ability to predict the machine’s future behavior, because not doing so reduces to ignoring the music the machine is producing and failing to respond to it, and so its future behavior will appear more aleatory.

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them such that one hears expressions of the self, negotiation, compromise, expressiveness, and all the other meanings one might rightly and naturally attribute to humanly produced music. We may take the intentional stance toward a simple thermostat, but hardly therefore imbue its behavior with the richness of meaning so as to think the thermostat has its own distinctive subjectivity that we may try to come to know. It would be foolhardy to try to place yourself in the shoes of your thermostat! We need something more than just a reason to take the intentional stance toward systems such as Voyager to treat them as improvising partners. For when we take the intentional stance, we do not believe that our thermostat acts intentionally, we simply act as if it does. In effect we make believe that it does, and a further investigation of “making believe,” of how and when we engage in such acts of imagination, helps us see a way to both explain and legitimize our improvising with machines. The difference between belief and make-­believe is crucial here. We need to consider the attitude we take toward fiction, both fictional characters and fictional narratives. Almost no one objects to the claim that fiction can engage our emotions, that we can come to care about fictional characters, that fictions can move us, and perhaps stronger still, that we can come to learn truths about the world and about ourselves from artful fictions.61 Of course, how this can be the case is hotly contested, and there are no universally accepted answers to the many questions our relationship to fictions raises. But for our purposes it is enough to note that we have no difficulty both realizing that fictions are just that, and being moved by them and caring for the inhabitants of fictional worlds. It is often claimed that we accomplish this via acts of our imagination; we play a game of make-­believe, making believe that the fictional worlds are real and that the characters are equally real. We treat the narrative as if it is telling truths, and we treat the characters as if they exist and are experiencing what happens to them in the narrative. This is a woefully thin account of complex matters, but it will have to do for this occasion.62 Most of us have no trouble playing such games of make-­believe, and those who cannot so enter sympathetically into a fictional world, and who remain steadfastly 61.  In this sense we take the intentional stance toward fictional characters, even though we may fail to have a theory, or even well-­formed beliefs, about what we are taking the intentional stance toward, that is, about what is the correct ontological status of fictional characters. 62.  There is a vast philosophical literature concerning these issues. Some of the classic discussions include: Currie, The Nature of Fiction; Lewis, “Truth in Fiction”; Parsons, Nonexistent Objects; Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics; Walton, Mimesis as Make-­Believe.

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committed to its status as a fiction, have great difficulty enjoying fiction or even seeing its point. Perhaps this is the attitude we could, and indeed should, take toward improvising machines. We should treat them as imaginary partners in our improvisations, playing a game of make-­believe, and when and if we do, we can make believe we are improvising with them with little if any loss of authenticity. We can hear their sonic contributions as expressive, imbued with meaning and assorted sonic symbolisms; we may learn things about ourselves, and about others, things both specific and general. We may be moved by them, and seem to move them by our own contributions to the improvisation. If we chose not to, or are unable to, make this imaginary leap, we will find such improvisations to be vexing, perhaps devoid of interest and meaning, or not actually present at all. Many skilled improvisers have no such difficulties entering such an imaginative game with improvising machines. Yet at the same time many of these very same improvisers are deeply committed to a broadly humanistic worldview, a view that emphasizes the human and the humanity in improvisatory acts, and that seems to require improvising with partners who equally manifest such humanity. How can this be—­is this just a sort of cognitive inconsistency on the part of such improvisers? Surely one explanation of this is that, because creative artist improvisers have active and rich imaginations, their beliefs about machine systems need not negatively affect their ability to make believe concerning them, any more than our belief that Harry Potter does not exist prevents us from caring about him.63 In addition, it requires a machine system that does produce sonically convincing contributions; this is a minimum condition for such make-­believe to take place. But I want to suggest that there may be a deeper reason at play here—­namely that all music listening requires one to take such an imaginative leap, to hear an imaginary persona in the music. Such a view is one of the dominant theories out there to explain the expressiveness of music in general, and in particular why we might be moved by music. This position has been most prominently argued for by Jerrold Levinson in a series of articles, and goes by the names “ready-­hearability” or “musical personae” theory.64 According to this theory, music’s expressiveness is a prod63.  A further inquiry into these issues would ask whether the full range of emotive and cognitive attitudes we might take toward other humans can be taken toward fictional characters and (so) improvising machines. Do we come to empathize with Harry Potter? Do we do so with Voyager? 64.  Most recently in Levinson “Musical Expressiveness.”

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uct of a listener imagining that the music is literally expressing emotion. The attitude we take to musical expressiveness is, according to this theory, just that we take toward the expressiveness of fictional characters in novels, and is no more or less puzzling than such cases since it is, in effect, an instance of such cases. As Andrew Kania puts it, “the expressivity itself resides in the music’s disposition to elicit the imaginative response in us of hearing the music as a literal expression of emotion. As a logical consequence, the imaginative experience prompted must include some agent whose expression the music literally is.”65 Such a view is also endorsed by the eminent psychologist of music John Sloboda, who claims that we need to treat musical stimuli as intentional and personal, as emanating from an autonomous agent, if we are to hear the music as expressive.66 Fictional personae theory can therefore be used not just to explain why we hear any music as expressive, but why we can hear computer-­generated improvisations as imbued with just as much meaning as any human-­produced improvisation. For we imagine it to be so, since we imagine a fictional improviser whose experiences, history, identity, feelings, and thoughts are being mediated via the sonic symbols produced. What works to account for expression can also account for other factors that we attribute to human improvisations.67 We do not take this to be the computer’s history of course, but that of an imaginary persona. And we are able to do this when the system does produce convincingly appropriate sonic contributions. In this sense we treat its sounds not unlike, I want to suggest, the way we treat our human fellow improvisers. For in such cases, too, I claim, we play a game of make-­believe. I hear sadness and joy, determination and heartache, resolution and compromise, in the sounds of my fellow improvisers. But it would be false, although it is often assumed to be the case, to conclude that I assume that when my bandmates play a sad passage that they are feeling sad—­feeling sad right then and there. No, I hear sadness in their sounds, and they perhaps need to have an understanding of what sadness is, coupled with the understand65.  Kania “The Philosophy of Music.” 66.  Sloboda, “The ‘Sound of Music.’” 67.  Once we imagine a fictional autonomous agent as producing the improvisation (or any music), then such an agent is imagined not only as being expressive, but as having whatever other properties are needed to sustain the heard expressiveness, or to account for other ways the music is heard. This too is analogous to the attitude we take toward fictional characters, because we not only believe Harry Potter is feeling sad, but that the sadness is caused by the death of his parents—­we believe he also has a history and past experiences that he might reveal to us.

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ing of a complex if imprecisely given set of musical rules for its expression, often genre-­determined. But here too we are in the realm of make-­believe. As many free jazz players of the “energy school” have claimed, it is a mistake to conclude that if you hear their music as angry it is because they are expressing their anger while improvising. The late David Ware stated that his “angry” music is a product of his stillness, peace, and calm; he is not angry, but perhaps the musical persona he conjures is. I may well make believe that my improvising partner is angry when their improvisations sound angry, and such making-­believe may make it easier for me to respond appropriately, but such make-­believe may well terminate the moment the improvisation ends.68 The crucial point is this—­both the machine and the human can produce music with the requisite properties to allow one to hear a fictional persona being expressive. Recall that when composed music is performed, we do not assume that the expressiveness of the music is that of the performers. If fictional personae theory can account for these cases, then it can be easily transferred to account for improvised music too. Our failure, or unwillingness, to do so is due, I claim, to the commonly held belief that with improvised music, what the music expresses is properly heard as revealing the felt states of the improviser herself. Yet this claim is hardly ever argued for, and when it is, not enough care is taken to distinguish the fact that the improviser is the source of her improvisations, that her sonic contributions are a product of her own deliberations, desires, technique, and wishes, and the distinct (and I think false) claim that they are indicative of her felt states. One must keep distinct the claim that the story she tells is necessarily autobiographical, from the more general claim that the story is a product of her autobiography, who she is, her subjectivity. The improvising human may be more like an actor than a person engaged in psychoanalysis.69 Actors express feelings, wants, desires, and personal narratives, but they are not their own. Yet of course we do believe that actors able to artfully express certain emotions need to have a subtle understanding of such emotions, and we often, rightly or wrongly, 68.  One cognitive function such making-­believe may serve is to allow one to more quickly understand, and so respond to, the improvisation by parsing it under a given expressive category, by hearing it, as, say, the expression of anger, as opposed to hearing it under a larger series of content categories that may well take up too much short-­term memory. 69.  This also has a grounding in an Afrological aesthetics. See, for example, the extended argument by Nicole Rustin-­Paschal concerning Charles Mingus’s “performance” of his (varied) identities via his musical and literary works (The Kind of Man I Am). More generally, Afrofuturism is grounded in such performative acts.

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attribute such an ability and understanding to their life stories, to aspects of their subjectivity. Fictional personae theory can explain not just why we might hear computer-­generated music as expressive, but why we may hear it as containing and mediating histories and personal sound, even though these are literally absent. This is a greater challenge, since the expression of emotion in humans is more or less generic: cries of sorrow, laughter, tears of pain, and the like. But to hear the music as bearing more personal content is a harder task, since the persona imagined needs to be more individual. Here is where the notion of software having a personal sound becomes crucial. For consider again the notion of emotional transduction that Lewis programmed into Voyager. If Lewis is correct that Voyager can mimic its human improvising partners’ emotions, then we have a readily supplied fictional agent, someone very much like the human improviser herself. This is why genre specificity is built into Voyager, why it uses rules to generate its music, since to agree to play with a certain set of musical structure-­producing rules is to agree, in effect, to be sonically similar to all others who so agree. All the musical personae produced will be similar to each other. But it is the ways we each choose to deviate from these rules that give our musical personae their individuality, and with Voyager this follows from the fact that it does produce music on its own. So Voyager produces a convincing musical persona, one like its partner, but not identical to her. That its musical output is like the human’s allows the human to hear enough familiarity in the machines sounds to understand its symbolic codes, to give them meaning and therefore to assume that these meanings are intended. Perhaps the most profound thought that emerges out of consideration of an improvising machine system such as Voyager is not that its machine nature precludes it from improvising, but that accepting its status as a virtual/fictional improvising partner is equally the realization that that is all we ourselves can be. The avatar that so many new forms of digital art evoke has always been on the scene, ever since humans have collectively made music together, and therefore told collective stories—­collective fictions. But as we know, and as some prominent philosophers have argued, there is no better way to learn about the “real” world than via a convincing fiction. The ghost in the machine is equally in each of us when we improvise.

Three

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over Work Completion in Improvised Music

Having seen the often hidden role the musical work concept plays in the law and so in people’s lives in Chapter One, and how Afrological notions of the musical work problematize this, and having gone on to examine the role of intentions in improvising in Chapter Two, we are now prepared to develop a positive theory of the musical work for improvised musics. Of course, a number of caveats are in order. The comments that follow are not intended to hold for all musics that one might consider improvisational. For our account needs to make sense of the discourses employed internal to a given musical practice, and there is no reason to believe (and ample reason to deny) that any single account will be in sympathy with all such discourses. However, the view I develop is in sympathy with the way a number of improvising communities tend to conceive of their improvising practices, particularly those closely related to the admittedly amorphous and far from unified jazz community. What follows fails if it helps explain no such existing discourse or is not easily amended to account for a number of such discourses. I want to try to bring together a number of perhaps seemingly unrelated themes. First, I want to sketch a relationship that improvised performances of (pre)composed works may stand in with respect to the work they are seen as performances of, based on what was established in Chapter Two. I argue that such performances are fruitfully seen as modifying the work in a particular way. I then want to show how this relation of a musical work to its performance history (both past and future) pertains to the manner in which we cognitively process any given single performance of a work (or improvisation), by showing that both cases entail similar notions of what constitutes musical understanding. I relate this to some recent applications of media103

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tion theory to theories of musical works in general, and to improvisations in particular. I then show how these previous points can be seen as part of an argument for what I call “aesthetic denseness”—­the claim that musical works (and art works in general) that are seen as having distinct sets of aesthetic properties when viewed from a number of genre perspectives, and that positively invite such a variety of perspectives, are aesthetically richer for this, and that this denseness is itself an important aesthetic property. I argue that a number of improvising musical traditions strive for such aesthetic denseness. Finally, I turn to the issue of so-­called free improvisations, those that (so it appears) are not intended to instance a preexisting work. I also relate the account developed to both historicist theories of the properties of musical works and the question of when an artwork is finished. An analysis of intentions will again be necessary. When this extended argument is completed (it constitutes this chapter and the next), I hope to have sketched a way to conceive of musical works in improvised musics that valorizes much of what we think their value is, and allows us to make sense of many discourses concerning them, without having to think that they are somehow wholly disjointed from other musical practices and discourses. Chapter Five further develops these thoughts into a more coherent “theory” of improvised works and performance. In Chapter One, we saw how an Afrological ontology of music problematizes, and deviates from, the ontology encoded in Western art-­music practices based around composition. We saw how the differences between the two centered on distinguishing in different ways the boundary, if there is one, between “mere” performative features and those that enter into the identity of a musical work. The ontology of music that underlies copyright law views the primary function of musical works as both establishing the properties their performances must have via notation of these properties, thereby individuating any given work from other works and establishing their own internal originality. In this view, musical works establish classes of their possible performances and clearly delineate which properties belong to the work and which to their performances. As a result, the primary function of musical performances is to refer back to the musical work they are performances of—­that is, to instance, token, exemplify, etc., the musical work. It is the relation between work and performance that is the most important, and that is the primary locus of philosophical interest and investigation. By foregrounding the role of work performance in making manifest the properties of the musical work itself (as we saw in Chapter One), an Afrological ontology of music invites us to reconsider the almost exclusive interest

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in the work/performance relation found in traditional ontology of music, instead suggesting that we look more at the performance/performance and performance/work relations. That is to say, Afrological ontologies of music tend to start with and prioritize performances, unlike Eurological ontologies, which start with the musical work concept. What this chapter will develop is a theory, grounded in Afrological practice and thought, that suggests that the most important ontological function that work performances discharge, particularly when faced with highly improvisational performances of works, is not so much to refer back to the musical work (although, as Chapter Five argues, they do accomplish this, but in a novel way) as it is to affect the possible class of future performances. Thinking about this carefully again shows how this also holds for performances of traditionally scored works, and so considering these issues from an Afrological perspective casts traditional concerns in the ontology of music in a new light. The chapter concludes by arguing that taking this function of work performance seriously suggests reexamining the whole question of when, how, and why musical works are thought to exist as finished, complete entities that, by virtue of their completed existence, can then determine the class of their performances. I argue that an Afrological account of musical works sees them as always in process, and as never in that sense complete, since the emphasis is on performance and performance histories. This account is in keeping with the emphasis on performer agency explored in Chapter Two, which sees performances and performers as the main sites of aesthetic interest, particularly in improvisatory contexts, and views the complex webs of sociality that collective improvisation is constituted by, that is, the assorted agencies at play and their interactions, as the locus of creativity—­including, as we shall see, the ongoing creation of musical works. Let us return to our example of John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things.” The song was originally scored for the Broadway play The Sound of Music, which opened on November 16, 1959, and ran for 1,443 performances. “My Favorite Things” is the third song of the first act. The music was written by Richard Rogers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Coltrane’s first recording of this is found on his album My Favorite Things, recorded in late October 1960 and released in 1961. The version Coltrane performs here, as with all his subsequent performances, is solely instrumental and runs about fourteen minutes. Coltrane was to go on to perform “My Favorite Things” many times in concert, and at least eighteen versions of it are available on recordings. By July 22, 1966, the performance (with a distinct band, now a quintet) had grown to over fifty-­seven minutes. Longer performances are

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said to have taken place, and Elvin Jones commented that once while Coltrane began a solo in “My Favorite Things” he went home, showered, then returned to the club, knowing that Coltrane would still be mid-­solo!1 For a useful analysis of the changing structure of Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things,” consult Scott Anderson’s thesis, entitled “John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of ‘My Favorite Things.’” Anderson takes it as a given that the four performances he analyzes, from 1960, 1963, 1965, and 1966, are all performances of “My Favorite Things.” Surely this is correct, but what we want to explain is in what sense they are all performances of “My Favorite Things,” and whether one or more of them could have not been a performance, had things been different than they were.2 The sense in which they all are performances of “My Favorite Things” is grounded most obviously in the fact that in some fairly straightforward way John Coltrane intended to perform “My Favorite Things,” and that the “jazz community” has never seriously questioned this claim—­the ontology of works at play for this community, however uncritically or unconsciously employed, takes this as a fact.3 To reiterate, the question that needs answering is not whether John Coltrane intended to perform “My Favorite Things,” but under what conditions we take it that he succeeded in acting on this intention. We believe, rightly, that he intentionally performed “My Favorite Things.” and so discharged his intention to do so. But why? Under what conditions might we be tempted to say, “Well, he intended to perform “My Favorite Things,” but he failed”? It is important to bear in mind that to ask why we take Coltrane’s performances to be of “My Favorite Things” is to ask a sociological question. 1.  In conversation with the author. 2.  Precisely what things would have to have been different is the question. The point is not whether, were they to sound different, they might not have been performances of “My Favorite Things” (this is obviously true), but what cultural, social, historical, and other states of affairs determine that these very sounds were constitutive of performances of “My Favorite Things,” and whether changes in these states of affairs might have entailed that these very same sounds would have failed to constitute performances of “My Favorite Things.” 3.  This is certainly the state of affairs now; in retrospect no one familiar with jazz history and discourse seriously questions whether these are performances of “My Favorite Things.” However, there may well have been debate concerning precisely this at the time of the performances—­assorted critics may have exclaimed, “Well, that sure is not ‘My Favorite Things!’” We need to see what to make of such cases, and the important point is that we now think they were mistaken. And some philosophers of music, having precise theoretical commitments concerning musical works and performance, continue to question the status of these performances.

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To answer this question would require complex reception studies of a sort perhaps impossible to do now, with members of audiences of the time, fellow musicians, critics, fans, journalists, and the like. No amount of post hoc analysis of the relationship any given Coltrane performance has to the work as scored, or as commonly performed prior to Coltrane’s first performance, will allow us to say by precisely what purely auditory features Coltrane’s first version, and subsequent versions, were commonly taken to be performances of “My Favorite Things.” Although careful analyses of Coltrane’s changing performance tradition, such as that undertaken by Anderson, are both fascinating in their own right and informative, they cannot tell us where the “cognitive” anchor to the musical work itself was, or is, found and heard by those familiar with these performances.4 We can, I take it, safely assume this much—­not just anything would have been taken to be a performance of “My Favorite Things” simply by virtue of the fact that Coltrane may have announced it as such. Surely there are sounds that he and his band could have produced that would have elicited the response “That sure was great, but it wasn’t ‘My Favorite Things!,’” and we would be tempted to agree.5 Given the context of these performances, the performance history they are part of, the particular musical culture they emerge out of, and of course the actual music produced, all collectively yield the fact that audiences, for the most part, “heard” “My Favorite Things” performed. Yet by virtue of what were they able to hear “My Favorite Things” in these performances, and so to take them to be performances of “My Favorite Things?” Analyses such as Anderson’s, which describe Coltrane’s modifications of the song structure, chords, rhythm, melody, and so on and identify moments in his performances that correspond (often in a loose sense) with the work 4.  This is not to claim that structural similarities between the work as scored or commonly performed and Coltrane’s performances are not behind the (correct) claims made to the effect that Coltrane did perform “My Favorite Things” when he said he did. It is simply to deny that one can assume this, and that any given similarities can be automatically taken to be the epistemic grounds for such performance claims. Even if you think “My Favorite Things” must be “heard,” in some narrow sense, in Coltrane’s performances of it, this does little to tell you what it is that is heard. 5.  As a matter of fact, this may well have been the response of some on hearing these performances. To this day I have knowledgeable music students who fail to believe that late Coltrane performances of “My Favorite Things” are just that, however interesting and aesthetically valuable they may find them to be. It is easy to cook up examples where one would be tempted to say, for example, that Coltrane has simply forgotten the name of the song he is playing, and mistaken it for “My Favorite Things” (if, say, he announces that his next song will be “My Favorite Things,” and plays something that is taken by all to be “Naima”).

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as scored or that can be seen as easily described modifications of the work as scored, do not, in and of themselves, tell us that it is by virtue of these similarities that the performances either should be, were, or are heard to be of “My Favorite Things.” There is a way to get such conclusions from the “fact” of such structural similarities between the performances and the work as scored, but it would be, I think, mistaken to endorse such a move. First, one might argue that there are, for any given genre of music, standards or rules of score compliance to which performances of works must adhere, and that an analysis of a given performance allows one to see if such standards are met. This falsely assumes that there are fixed standards of score compliance, and it decides the “fact of the matter” independent of the opinion of any member of the community that it claims to be judging these matter for. This is not to claim that such correspondences between performance and score do not enter into the reasons why a given community hears and judges a given Coltrane performance to be of “My Favorite Things”—­that is, it is not to claim that they do not matter at all. The point is that such correspondences, in and of themselves, apart from how a given community “receives” them in their judgments of performance identity, do not determine the matter.6 Such accounts are prescriptive and normative in a manner that is at odds with what they are trying to explain, viz., why certain performances are, as a matter of fact, taken to be performances of musical works. One cannot claim that a given performance is a performance of “My Favorite Things” if, and only if, it manifests some set of correspondences between the performance and the work as scored. If we are concerned to develop a theory that has it that epistemological facts of the matter determine the ontology, then no account of sonic or structural similarities between performances of “My Favorite Things” can, in and of itself, establish that it is these very similarities that are heard and cause the judgment that both are performances of “My Favorite Things.” Of course they may be the cause, or a partial cause, of such judgments, but merely discovering such similarities does not do the trick. To endorse such a view is to allow, in principle, a difference between what theory and general discourse might determine as to whether a given performance is of “My Favorite Things”; it is, in effect, to allow ontology and epistemology to radically disagree.7 For even if you think that some sort 6.  The fact that a given community may fail to agree about whether a given performance is of “My Favorite Things” (or any other work) is no reason to reject community standards (in favor perhaps of a metaphysically “cleaner” criterion), but it is a crucial phenomenon that needs to be accounted for. The phenomenon that needs explaining in this case would be why these communities differ in their opinions, and not which opinion is objectively correct. 7.  This is perhaps the most powerful and basic reason why the theory of musical works

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of structural similarity test establishes the facts of the matter concerning work performance, one is still faced with the (now) distinct question: why does a given community or individual believe that a given performance is of a given work?8 Alternatively, one might claim that a formal analysis of Coltrane’s performances and “My Favorite Things” as scored allows one to claim that his performances contain parts of “My Favorite Things,” that “My Favorite Things” is, in effect, an ingredient in Coltrane’s performances, and that such an analysis allows one to identify the parts. A view such as this is in sympathy with a line developed by James Hamilton.9 A problem with such a view—­that bits and pieces of “My Favorite Things” are in all of Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things”—­is that it does not ground the claim that Coltrane’s performances are performances of “My Favorite Things,” but just that they are performances that make use of materials from “My Favorite Things.”10 It may be by virtue of these “bits” in the performances that the performances are, as a matter of fact, judged to be performances of “My Favorite Things,” and their performances developed by Goodman in Languages of Art is doomed to failure. In his theory, many musical works may never in fact have been performed, since in his view the simplest deviation from the score is sufficient to yield a failure to have performed the work so scored. Moving to a theory of “tokening” or “instancing” a work, as opposed to performing it, is no help since it is simply a way to in fact recognize the failure of such a theory to account for the concept “performance” as it is in fact universally employed. And worse still, it avoids doing all the philosophical heavy lifting that a theory of tokening, etc., requires if it is to account for the actual wide variety of sounds that constitute the class of tokens of a musical work. As a matter of fact Coltrane and his band members may have employed language looser than that of “performance” when discussing “My Favorite Things”; the point is to ground appropriately the relationship putative performances of “My Favorite Things” have to the musical work “My Favorite Things” in a manner consistent with such usage, and that does not predetermine an answer to the “Is this a performance of ‘My Favorite Things’” question independently of these usages and the generally accepted judgements of those who produce and consume such music. 8.  An additional problem is this: if you develop a musicological theory that identifies structural similarities between performances taken to be of “My Favorite Things” and the song “My Favorite Things,” your theory itself—­where and how it detects similarities—­is colored by your a priori beliefs that you are analyzing performances of “My Favorite Things”—­that the similarities are there to be uncovered and described. Given the fact that the structural analysis of music is open to the creation of arbitrary similarities and differences, you are not so much discovering the similarities as you are creating—­and then describing—­them. 9.  See Hamilton, The Art of Theater. 10. Eric Clapton’s famous guitar solo in “Sunshine of Your Love,” itself written after attending a Jimmy Hendrix Experience concert, contains parts of the standard “Blue Moon,” but it is not, for that reason, a performance, nor only solely a performance, of “Blue Moon.” Nor do we take hip-­hop songs that contain samples of other songs to normally be performances of those sampled songs.

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but this too would need to be determined empirically.11 And this view suffers from the problem just discussed; it would be a mistake to assume that we can tell if “My Favorite Things” is an ingredient in a given performance simply by comparing the sound structure produced with the score—­to begin with, we need to know what counts as a “part” of “My Favorite Things” for the musicians and listening community at hand, and to answer this one would already, so it seems, have answered the question of whether one is faced with a performance of “My Favorite Things.” Is “My Favorite Things” present, as a part, in a performance that, for a bit, “feels” like “My Favorite Things,” that is, that follows its melody, or its chords, or its rhythm, or some combination of these? And “follows” in what sense, to what degree, according to what standards? Need all the musicians contribute to the ingredient for it to be present, or is one partial contribution enough, and for how long?12 Questions such as these abound. There is no way to determine this in advance of a detailed investigation into what some community takes “My Favorite Things” to be, and so what it takes performances of it to be like.13 And of course, once you have established this, one can always identify some features of the performance that can be analyzed as being similar to the work as scored—­this follows from the fact that everything is similar to everything else in some respects. But this post hoc reasoning does not, in and of itself, help you establish that this is why a performance is heard as “My Favorite Things.” 11.  For Hamilton, the claim that a (dramatic) text is an ingredient in a performance is meant, among other things, to allow the performance to be an artwork in its own right. Yet it is also meant to follow from this that the performance is not a performance of the text. Here we have, I think, a conflict with the normal discourses surrounding, say performances of “My Favorite Things” (and many, many other performances in the jazz tradition). We want to have it that such performances are both performances of the work at hand, and free-­standing artworks. While such a position is not, in and of itself, obviously incompatible with Hamilton’s ingredient view, it is not the way he wishes to develop it. 12. To take an extreme example, “My Favorite Things” contains the note C, so is any performance that contains the note C a performance of “My Favorite Things”? Surely not, but why not? 13.  For reasons such as those just mentioned, various studies in music perception that establish, say, our ability to hear the same melody through certain transformations, or tones an octave apart as the same note, cannot, in and of themselves, tell us why we hear the Live in Japan “My Favorite Things” as a performance of “My Favorite Things.” Such studies supply us with important information that effects possible (partial) answers to such questions, but they do not determine an answer. Better still, such experiments tend to rule out certain answers—­ say, answers that require the perception/cognition of things that it can be established we are incapable of perceiving/conceiving.

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And so in what follows there is little discussion of the musical structural links between distinct performances of a given work, even if such links as a matter of fact help ground the claim that a given sounding is a performance. Instead I want to focus on what I think the judgment that a given sounding is a performance of a given work—­whatever might be the reasons to taking this to be the case—­determines about future judgments as to whether distinct soundings are performances of this work. How does our history of performance judgments affect what future performance judgments we might endorse or deny? We need to focus on what taking a given performance to be of “My Favorite Things” requires us to understand about the performance, and, crucially, what such understanding entails for what we might come to take as (future) performances of “My Favorite Things.” If epistemology is to power ontology, then we must delve into musical cognition, to some degree at least, for we must have an account of what “happens” cognitively when we judge a given musical work to have been performed.14 Our account of musical understanding and ontology must be consistent with what we know of musical cognition. We start with the observation that denying the claim that some fixed correspondence between a score and sounds produced determines if the sounds constitute a performance of the work is not to claim that “anything goes.” We need not end up faced with Nelson Goodman’s “Three Blind Mice” worry, namely that any soundings might end up being a performance of any work. Communities that foreground improvisation do not judge a performance to be of a given work randomly or haphazardly. This leaves open the possibility that a given performer may fail in their attempt to perform a given work—­they may claim they have performed such a work, but convince no one (perhaps not even themselves!).15 The possibility of failure arises directly from the fact that not just any 14.  The following discussion is intended to be general enough to hold for many distinct communities and their judgments about whether or not a given sounding is of “My Favorite Things.” In addition, I will make use of aspects of music cognition that also are rather general, that is, aspects that there is good reason to believe are universal and not themselves products of acculturated habits of listening (as many aspects of our perception of music no doubt are). 15.  The flip side of this point is we may discover that a performance melodically equivalent to “Three Blind Mice” could in fact be a performance of “My Favorite Things” given a certain performance history and reception of “My Favorite Things.” The seeming absurdity of Goodman’s morphing of Beethoven’s Ninth into “Three Blind Mice” is only threatening if you think, a priori, that the performances of musical works come with strict melodic limitations that preclude such melodic similarities.

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sounding can be the performance of any musical work. Were I to announce that I was about to perform “My Favorite Things” and proceeded to drop a hammer on the floor, command my dog to bark once, and then produce a short concert C on my trumpet, it may well be the case that I have failed to perform “My Favorite Things.” I may have produced a performance inspired by “My Favorite Things,” or about “My Favorite Things,” but neither of these options is the same as having performed “My Favorite Things.” However, we cannot conclude this based simply on a description of what sounds were produced and how, however detailed it may be. For one may discover that such an odd performance as just described is actually best seen as a performance of “My Favorite Things,” given the work’s performance history to date, my intentions, and my particular performance history of this and other works. For there may well be a cultural perspective, including the opinions of an appropriately informed group of music consumers, for which my odd performance does “count” as a performance of “My Favorite Things.” They view it as such, they compare it to other performances they take to be of “My Favorite Things” (“The hammer is good, but I wish there were more cowbells!”), and it can be seen in some potentially transparent sense as coming out of these other performances, as being related to them in assorted ways, and so on. How can we account for this possibility? Are we back at the “anything goes” position? I want to claim that a given performance of a musical work makes possible a new set of performances of the musical work. Once a given performance is accepted in a principled way as a performance of a given work, there then exists a whole new set of possible performances of this work. These possible performances were not possible prior to this given (actual) performance. Were one in the past to have actually sounded one of these now-­possible performances, it would not have counted as a performance of the given work. A given performance makes possible future performances, and this is one of its most important roles.16 The precise performance history of a given work determines its possible future. The ways in which future performances might continue to modify, and deviate from, the work as scored (and as previously performed) yet still be considered to be performances of the work is guided by the history of such performances and the new possibilities for sounding the work that they reveal. This is because an essential 16.  In this sense, highly improvisational performances of works are not merely ephemeral, merely “in the now,” but affect the future. Future performances bear the mark, so to speak, of past performances.

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feature of what enters into a community’s determination of whether a given sounding should count as a performance of a given work is the performance history of the work. What a community has considered to be a performance of a given work determines to a great extent what it will so consider. For example, if all that existed at a given time was the initial Broadway performance history of “My Favorite Things,” and someone (perhaps Coltrane himself and his quartet), were to produce a sound structure indistinguishable from that (rightly) called “My Favorite Things” that Coltrane produced on the Live in Japan album, it may not count at that time, from any perspective, as a performance of “My Favorite Things.” It is the performance history of this work, and how it is precisely embedded in a particular musical culture, and how Coltrane in particular relates to this culture, that allows each given performance by Coltrane of “My Favorite Things” to be just that, for it makes sense of this history and culture to consider them as a set to all be performances of “My Favorite Things.” Were the performance order to be juggled, this may not be the case, for the earlier performances make possible the later performances.17 It is crucial to realize that the performance history of a given work does not, in and of itself, determine possible future performances, but only this history as considered by a given community with its related beliefs concerning musical genres and the like. Given that a community takes the performance history of “My Favorite Things” to be what they take it to be, and given what they take the performance methods of some performers to be, and given how they view the constantly changing standards of work compliance, etc.—­these elements determine what they will take to count as future performances of the work. While the “My Favorite Things” found on the album Live in Japan may well count as such a performance, given Coltrane’s history of such performances and the way they were received by the community, were Guy Lombardo’s band to have produced such sounds (perhaps under the influence of a large dose of mind-­altering drugs!), no one might have judged them to have performed “My Favorite Things.”18 17.  And, of course, if other elements of history were to change, a given sounding may or may not be taken to be a performance of “My Favorite Things.” A world without jazz and jazz communities may well be one where, were one to produce a performance that sounds just like one of Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things,” one would not have produced a performance of “My Favorite Things.” 18.  Were Coltrane’s version to be played by the orchestra in the Broadway pit during a performance of the play The Sound of Music at the very same time that Coltrane was performing the piece, it would not, I suspect, be taken to be a performance of “My Favorite Things.”

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The claim is that the performance history of a given musical work coupled with its reception parses the set of all future soundings into two classes, those that would be, and those that would not be, performances of “My Favorite Things.” A change in the performance history may well yield a change in this partition of possible future soundings.19 To summarize, it is performance/performer histories, coupled with community expectations, that determine whether a given sounding partially caused by an intention to perform “My Favorite Things” is rightly seen as discharging this intention in such a way that an intentional performance of “My Favorite Things” results, or, alternatively, whether the resultant sounds fail to be a performance of “My Favorite Things.” The following diagram is a visualization of this:

As one can see, performances that at one time were not possible performances of a given work can come to be possible at a later time.20 The performance of P1 and its reception for a given community makes Pb a future possible performance while Pd is impossible as a performance of the work in question. If Pd were then to be performed at a time after P1, with no other change in either the work’s performance history or the given community’s views about the work’s potential performances, it would not be considered a performance of the given work. Now if at a future time Pb is 19.  I will not pursue this further here, but it is also possible that the acceptance of certain performances as being of a given work can in effect also change the past—­a performance that was not at the time taken to be a performance of a given work might come to be seen to have been one, but it may well remain the case that it was not such a performance at the time it was performed. 20.  This model is not equivalent to possibility indexed to a time (i.e., temporally indexed possibility), since it also requires consideration of communities for whom the temporally indexed possibilities hold or fail to hold.

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performed and is taken to be a performance of the work at hand, it makes Pd a possible performance of the given work, where it was not earlier.21 The given community, by accepting Pb as a performance, can now “hear its way” to considering Pd to be a possible performance where it could not earlier. Actual performances of works, embedded in their reception histories, establish ever-­changing fields of possible future performances. These fields of possible performances might be quite fine-­grained, indexed to given ensembles or given audiences, and so on. A sounding that might count as a given work performance if performed by a given ensemble at a given time might not constitute a performance if it were sounded by a different ensemble at the very same time.22 Heated debates may arise between different subcommunities as to whether a given performance is just that, for their “fields of possible performances” at a given time may differ. A given community’s “field of possibility” at time T for a work might be far wider than most others at that time, and yet at later times they may converge as others come to share this subcommunity’s standards of work performance. In retrospect, others may come to judge that this other group’s opinion was correct—­that it was a performance of “My Favorite Things” after all.23 Let us call this model of the relationship between a musical work and its performances “the modal model.”24 Given this model we can perhaps see a way to capture what is distinc21.  This model opens up space for thinking about the concept of innovation with respect to whether or not a given new performance changes the field of possible future performances, and to what degree. 22.  For this reason it is important to note that these possible performances are not simply sound structures, but performances with a host of contextual information as part of what individuates them from other possible performances, and from nonperformances. Two identical sound structures, each realized by a distinct ensemble, may well constitute two performances with differing modal statuses. 23.  That is to say, at a later time, a past performance that was not at the time of its sounding, or at earlier times, a possible performance of “My Favorite Things” may come to have been one, given the field of performances taken to be “My Favorite Things” temporally posterior to this performance. A given community may in effect change its mind, and by accepting certain things as performances of “My Favorite Things,” the prior set of such performances may change. This complicates the modal model, but not impossibly so. 24.  It is worth noting that this modal model does not work in S5 or any modal logic that has it that possibility is transitive. Of course, since logical possibility is not at issue here, such deviations from S5 need not particularly worry those committed to “standard” modal logic. The term “modal model” is borrowed from “The Modal Model of Memory,” as first articulated in the 1960s by the psychologists Atkinson and Shiffrin in On Human Memory. It is again worth considering Picasso’s famous quip when told by a friend that his recently painted portrait of Gertrude Stein did not look like her—­“Don’t worry, it will!”

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tive about particularly innovative performances of musical works. Mundane performances of works do little, if anything, to change the set of possible future performances of the work. Innovative performances may radically revise the set of possible future performances. Their challenge is to be familiar enough to count as a performance but different enough to effect a radical change in future performances. This is a difficult challenge, and liminal performances are often the subject of fierce debate concerning their status as work performances. An attempted performance that is too radical may fail to be accepted as a performance at all, and so instead of radically changing the field of possible future performances may simply be relegated to the dustbin of failed performances.25 This model suggests many other questions and issues. I want to foreground just a couple of these. First, I want to suggest that this model of the relationship of performances to each other, that is, how a given understanding of temporally earlier performances helps determine what are subsequent performances, is closely related to an aspect of how many think we understand any given performance as it temporally unfolds. In effect, this view of the relationship of performances to each other treats such sets of performances as if they are distinct temporal parts of a given performance. This is a virtue of the model, for it helps unify an account of musical understanding. The following is a gloss on a widely accepted account of one aspect of music cognition. While hearing music, what we have heard and are hearing, and crucially, how we cognitively represent what we hear (which involves not just the reception of auditory features, but complex culturally embedded views on musical genres, significance, function, etc.) produces a field of possible ways the music might go. Based on what we have heard and are hearing, we expect, to differing degrees, the music to “continue like this.” An essential part of our perception of music, and indeed part of why we take certain sounds to constitute a unified unfolding musical event, is our constant altering expectation of how the music might unfold. Our perception of the music we are hearing “in the now” colors what we expect to hear 25.  One may draw a political moral to this—­in keeping with much discourse on avant-­ garde jazz performance. If such performances are “sounding the possible,” are about making possible alternative futures that were not previously possible, then the analogy with political action intended to bring about certain futures—­to make them possible, and ultimately actual, is apparent. Some of the “official” texts of the ICASP/IICSI research project(s) state that improvisation is a practice that reveals new forms of democratic discourse. Perhaps one should say that it also makes possible new forms hitherto unimaginable as possible.

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in the near future. This appears to be one of the few uncontested “facts” of music cognition.26 This feature of our cognition of music has been linked to a partial theory of the enjoyment of music. In general, when listening to music we anticipate certain possibilities of how the music might continue to be less or more likely. If our expectations are met too fully and too continually, the music will seem boring and dull. If our expectations are never met, then the music will seem confusing and unenjoyable, and perhaps in extreme cases may not seem like music at all. In this sense, how we conceive of the parts of a musical work as presently heard determines what we take to be possible futures for the work. We hear a work as unified, and not as a series of discrete soundings, partially because our understanding of the sounds we are hearing, and expect to hear, is a function of what we have just heard and the degree to which this understanding produces a field of likely future hearings that track more or less what we do in fact come to hear. Of course, our ability and willingness to hear such unity is often strongly colored by highly contextual features, such as being told that one is hearing a performance of a musical work (as opposed, say, to simply hearing unrelated background sounds, sounds that collectively might be acoustically indistinguishable from the sounds that constitute the performance of a given work), even if the work itself, at one level of analysis, sounds like a series of unrelated soundings of diverse means of production, timbre, intensity, and so on. Genre-­based knowledge is also crucial. If one takes a given performance to be of a work intended to have harmonic development/unity, but you are mistaken, this will radically alter how you represent to yourself what you have heard and expect to hear.27 Surely one result of this is that your enjoyment of the piece 26. Most research focuses on melodic expectation. The classic text here is Leonard B. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music. This work was expanded by Eugene Narmour in two publications, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures and The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity. Much research in this area is based on Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. See also Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, “A Model of Melodic Expectation.” David Huron sums up clearly the state of play up to 2006 in Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. The subsequent literature is vast and continues to grow. 27.  Some musical genres may be fruitfully distinguished from each other by the degree to which they call for, or even require, wide variation in how musical performances may unfold. A jam-­band fan may require that his expectations of how the music will unfold be regularly thwarted, while a fan of teen pop may require note-­for-­note reenactments of recorded versions of songs.

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may be diminished, since you expect the music to unfold in a manner that reveals harmonic development, but it constantly fails to do so. Of course, you may come to alter your expectations and hear the work as a radical and exciting departure from the expected norms, and so come to judge the performance to have a number of aesthetically positive qualities.28 The use I want to make of this feature of music cognition need not decide what is, in principle, very difficult to know—­precisely how differing expectations, and the degree to which they are met, might affect our aesthetic judgments of a given performance.29 The important point is that how we treat past and present hearings with respect to immediately future hearings is crucial in our judging a given hearing as being of a single, unified musical work. To hear what follows a given bit of music as the next temporal part of this music is to understand what one comes to hear as having been a possible future way in which what one has just heard might continue. One is continually revising possible futures for the music as it unfolds, and what might at one moment in our hearing of the performance of a musical work have been an impossible way for it to go might come to be possible given how, as a matter of fact, it unfolds, and so might have us revise our (continually changing) judgments of the possible futures for the music we are hearing, that is, the ways we think it might go. It appears that a similar sort of cognitive process is involved in hearing highly improvisatory performances as being performances of preexisting works, which is evidence that there is value in viewing them each as states of an evolving/unfolding work. To understand a given Coltrane performance of “My Favorite Things” is to relate it to previous performances and what they suggested future performances might sound like. There must be the appropriate cognitive relation between one’s understanding of the past performance history and the present performance to judge the present sounding to be such a performance.30 Again, the degree to which such 28.  See, for example Susan McClary’s account of Phillip Glass’s “Glassworks” in her Conventional Wisdom, 142–­45. 29.  It would be worth pursuing how such theories of one source of musical pleasure, based on a ratio of expectations met to those thwarted—­too many met and the music is deemed dull and unexciting, too many thwarted and the music is deemed chaotic and simply “noise”—­are related to classical empiricist theories of beauty, such as Hutcheson’s famous claim that beauty resides in an object manifesting “uniformity amidst variety.” Those familiar with the development of Western tonality will recognize how closely its use of expectation and fulfillment as unifying structural principles assumes tacitly this sort of model of musical mental representation and understanding. 30.  As we will see below, Georgina Born and others have drawn on Husserl’s notion of

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expectations are both met and foiled will partially determine whether the new sounding is thought to be an interesting, enjoyable, or innovative new performance of “My Favorite Things” and will establish new standards for future performances. The fact that this is (partially) how we understand such performances is to say we treat them as we treat the temporal parts of a given performance of a musical work. And in this sense we have epistemic reason to think of the distinct sets of sounds that we come to consider as constituting performances of “My Favorite Things” to be in effect parts of that very work, and so to view the work itself as changing and evolving through time like an individual performance itself does. There is a double and interrelated process of (1) memory (retention), (2) present hearing, and (3) expectation (protention) at play. While hearing a given performance, we relate what we have heard to what we are hearing, and so to what we expect to hear. This process establishes, at the most basic representational level, whether we judge this hearing to be of a unified piece of music, and whether we represent these sounds as music rather than a series of unrelated sounds. At a higher level of representation we judge whether what we are hearing is a performance of a given known work, and whether it is aesthetically interesting. However, both of these judgments are colored by a prior set of structurally similar judgments concerning what possible future performances of a given work might sound like based on what we believe performances have sounded like in the past. For you cannot judge a given unfolding performance of “My Favorite Things” to be just this if you do not already have reason to believe that “My Favorite Things” could sound like this. Your judgments may, of course, be conflicted (perhaps you are authoritatively told that this is a performance of “My Favorite Things,” but it does not fit with what you take a possible performance of “My Favorite Things” to sound like), and you may find yourself needing to radically alter your expectations concerning possible future performances or the aesthetic value of what you take to be performances of “My Favorite Things.” These two ways in which we coordinate past hearing, present hearing, and expected hearings feed back on each other in complex ways. If this is correct, then some of the reasons we take a given performance to be of a single unified work enter into why we might take distinct and sonically different performances to be of the same work. To put the point in very broad strokes, the past and present determine possible futures—­determine “protention” as applied to the phenomenology of temporal duration to help make sense of this.

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what we are willing or able to accept as the next parts of a given performance of a work or new performances of a given work.31 This proposal, which offers a degree of unity with respect to musical understanding—­both of individual works and of performances of works—­suggests that musical works can and do change with their performance histories. Crucially, they can change their aesthetically relevant properties, that is, their “art content,” since distinct performances may exhibit distinct, and perhaps even contradictory, aesthetically relevant properties. A given performance of a musical work may make possible a future performance with a hitherto unrealized set of aesthetically relevant properties. Musical works can come to sound “like this,” which previously was not the case, and sounding “like this” may well warrant attributing properties to the work that one would not, and could not, have attributed to it earlier. That musical works can change—­that they do not “enjoy” the Platonic property of changelessness—­is denied by most ontologists of music. For example, in his essay “Artworks and the Future,” Jerrold Levinson has argued forcefully against the possibility that any artwork varies its “art-­properties.”32 I want to tease out some of the implications of this position when considering musical works and their performances. I will not embark on a full-­scale refutation of Levinson’s position as much as I will demonstrate some of its ramifications. What I will do is suggest that the above discussion of the way we often understand the relationship of the performances of given works to each other and to possible future performances suggests a way to reconcile a Levinsonian-­style historicism with the claim that musical works are open to change and revision. That is to say, one can, if one wishes, agree with Levinson and agree that musical works can change via their changing performance histories. As this is, I think, a more interesting although perhaps more contentious view to hold than a generic rebuttal of historicism, it is the path I will follow here. If one is not sympathetic with historicism, one will have even less reason to worry when faced with the changeability of musical works.33 If Levinson is correct, musical works cannot change their properties, for their properties are fixed at the moment of the work’s creation. While, 31.  The theory being developed here can be seen as one way of unpacking the claim made by Amiri Baraka, in the context of discussing Sun Ra, that, “What is not is what drives what is, and transforms it into itself. What is becomes what is not and what is not becomes what is and what is not. The future is always here in the past” (“Jazzmen” 255). 32.  Levinson, “Artworks and the Future.” 33.  Although one may have additional worries based on, for example, one’s commitment to both the abstract nature of musical works and the changelessness of all abstracta.

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according to Levinson, some of these properties might not be readily accessible at the moment of the work’s creation, they do hold of the work from that moment on, changelessly. We need to interrogate this claim in light of the model of the musical work under consideration that does allow, and indeed requires, musical works to change their properties with time. The issues here are more complex than they may at first appear. For there seem to be ways that the historicist can contend both that musical works have their properties changelessly, and that performances of works may vary in their properties. The main source of the complications is due to the differing nature of musical works from artworks that are artifactual. Since musical works are performed, and our primary (one might argue exclusive) epistemic access to the art-­relevant properties of musical works is via performance, there are, in effect, two entities on the scene that one might want to view as changing or changeless with respect to art-­relevant properties: a performance and a work. What I mean is this: if John Coltrane’s initial performance of “My Favorite Things” is haunting, brooding, and introspective, then it appears there are four things one can say about the musical work “My Favorite Things” concerning whether it shares in these properties:

1. “My Favorite Things,” the musical work, also has these properties and always has; this performance merely makes them manifest. 2. “My Favorite Things,” the musical work, previously was not haunting, brooding, and introspective, but now, as a result of this performance, it is. 3. “My Favorite Things,” the musical work, does not have these properties, only this (and perhaps other) performances of it do. 4. “My Favorite Things,” the musical work, does not have these properties, and since Coltrane’s performance does, it is not, as a matter of fact, a performance of “My Favorite Things.”

We need to consider these options in turn. The first option is to buy into a Levinsonian style historicism. But that would not simply endorse historicism, it would also claim that the aesthetic properties that performances manifest transfer to the musical work the performance is of (at least in this case). In this version of historicism, the musical work has all the properties performances of it have.34 If we grant this, perhaps only for the time being, 34.  Such a view problematizes the manner in which, for the historicist, the properties of the musical work are meant to determine the properties of proper performances and to (there-

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what follows? Well, taking such a position seems to threaten the “objectivity” of musical works, for one seems to be in a position not all that different from the idealist concerning musical works. For there is now a serious gap between the properties musical works have and our epistemic access to them, since on this account musical works have all the properties all performances of them will ever have, which is not something we can possibly know. Not only that, but musical works may end up having contradictory properties, or perhaps simply far more properties than historicist-­minded theorists want to countenance.35 For is not one motivation behind historicism the desire to both objectify and limit the range of art properties that artworks have, contra certain deconstructivist and, more generally, relativist styles of theorizing? Why do these conclusions follow? Seeing such properties as transferring to the musical work, and so having it that the musical work has them at all times it exists, means that musical works have all the (so transferable) properties that any performance of them will ever have. One might, depending on one’s theoretical commitments to certain versions of the ontic status of possibilia, need to consider all possible performances. So now a musical work has a whole host of properties, properties that need to enter generally into both our understanding of the work and our aesthetic judgments and evaluations of it, which are, of necessity, epistemically inaccessible. An alternative is to deny that such properties, those not manifest or epistemically accessible, need to or should enter into our understanding of the musical work that has them, limiting ourselves only to the properties that are accessible. Such a move will not be one that the historicist is likely to make, since the manifest properties may very well be those that the historicist wants to deny are “real”; that is, these properties do not enter into understanding and evaluation of the work at hand (since the historicist may be committed to the musical work having properties that we cannot now access). Now if a musical work has all the properties that all (possible?) performances of the work manifest, then it may well be that musical works have not only contradictory properties (i.e., “My Favorite Things” is both brooding and sprightly, haunting and light, etc.) but perhaps virtually all posfore) play a crucial role in determining whether a given sounding is a performance of a given work. For instance, Levinson’s conception of a musical work as an indicated S/PM structure is consistent with his strict historicism—­you look to the work, as an indicated type, to discover the properties that performances of the work must manifest. 35.  One of the seeming benefits of historicism is that the art properties a musical work has are rather tidy, for they are all and only those the work has at the moment of its creation.

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sible properties, since one can imagine a performance that manifests virtually any expressive or aesthetic property. To deny that all such performances are performances of “My Favorite Things” is not only to fall back onto an unreasoned score-­driven notion of performance authenticity, but it is to be left with a circularly vacuous theory, since how can you determine which properties a given performance might manifest are those that exclude it from actually being such a performance? How does one tell, apart from a performance history, what properties performances should, or need to, have to be of a given work?36 One would have to deny from the get-­go that, say, two performances with contradictory properties are actually both performances of the same work, claiming that which of the two is a performance of the work was determined by the very act of bringing the musical work into existence. The act of composition needs to radically limit the properties of its performances, and limit them in such a way that the “real” allowable properties can be determined. Yet how could this possibly be the case? Is it not by hearing performances that we come to know what properties the corresponding work has? The only alternative is a kind of historicism-­in-­ the-­dark; that is, to claim that the properties of a musical work are all fixed by the act of the work’s creation, but that we cannot, even in principle, know what these are, and so such historicism will play no role in establishing whether a given sounding is a performance of the work—­is a pure metaphysical conceit.37 This worry is a real one, and also relates closely to the third option, namely that only the performances manifest these properties, not the work itself. I find it difficult to see how one can parse properties in such a way. Can one really read off a score all, or even any, of the aesthetic/art properties of the work? At a bare minimum is not one thinking about, or “hearing in the head,” some sort of idealized performance? And is not that necessarily indexed to what one thinks a performance would sound like if performed in a certain manner, by a certain kind of ensemble, from a certain precise perspective from within a given music-­making community? One is, of necessity, 36.  Recall that scores normally determine in fact very few properties of performances. To literally follow a score in a machine-­like way will almost inevitably produce a performance lacking even the most generally accepted aesthetic/art properties attributed to the work. The aesthetic/art properties of a musical work are revealed by performance. 37.  At this point one is likely to move to a view like that of Goodman, where whether a particular sounding is a performance of a certain work is wholly determined by a narrow reading of score compliance. Yet this will not determine many, if any, art properties of the work or the performance.

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assuming certain rules of score reading, score compliance, tacit performance rules, and so on. One might exclaim that such things are always assumed when reading a score, and that these are the very such rules intended by the composer to fix the properties the work has. This just is historicism; the musical work has those properties that a performance of it according to all of these intended tacit rules has. The problem is, of course, that such properties will not be fixed even by an explicit statement of these background assumptions. Musical interpretation is always possible, and indeed necessary. Scores need to be interpreted by performers, and variation is always possible. Subtle differences in pacing, articulation, voicing, timbre, dynamics, and so on can radically change the art/aesthetic properties of a musical work that a performance may reveal. More to our point, the works under consideration drawn from the jazz tradition do not come with such strict rules for their realization, and the musical communities that we are considering do not countenance such strict rules, regardless of the original composer’s intention. All we have to go on are the properties that performances taken to be “legitimate” performances of a given work manifest, and these can and do vary greatly.38 Even if you think some aesthetic properties can be read off scores, it certainly will not be all of them, and this fact will not rule out a wide range of performances that manifest a variety of art/aesthetic properties. More generally, it seems like a sort of metaphysical cheat to claim that musical works are changeless, yet pack in all the work that changing properties are meant to do by claiming that musical works have all these properties for all the times they exist. It seems far more sensible to claim that Coltrane turns “My Favorite Things” into a brooding work, or makes it possible for it to be so. “My Favorite Things” was not brooding prior to his performance; it’s not just that we didn’t, or couldn’t, know that it was. This is what the modal model accomplishes.39 And seeing the “metaphysical work” of changing the properties of “My Favorite Things” as being discharged by Coltrane 38.  With jazz performances it is not simply a case of knowing if a given passage in a performance is a performer-­determined cadenza or solo, so that its aesthetic properties might not “infect” the work. Coltrane’s performance as a whole has the aesthetic properties it has, not just his solo in the work as scored, since he does not, strictly speaking, perform the work as scored at all. 39.  As with the Kivy/Levinson debate concerning whether musical works are discovered or created, it seems more plausible to have it that Coltrane gives new properties to the works he performed, as opposed to discovering properties that were always there. For one thing, the discovery model is hard pressed to account for why such basic aesthetic properties that performances such as Coltrane’s might reveal were not already discovered by others. How could they be so basic, and yet have been so buried?

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himself (and his fellow musicians) is to locate the agency responsible for the properties “My Favorite Things” comes to have with performers/improvisers, and not all with the composer, in keeping with the model of musical agency found in Afrological aesthetics. Responsibility for what properties “My Favorite Things” comes to have is shared between the composer and performers. We have, in effect, addressed option three. If we claim that only performances manifest such properties, and they do not transfer to the musical work, then we seem to wrap the work itself in a perhaps epistemically impenetrable barrier, for our knowledge of the art properties of musical works is mediated by properties perceived in performance. If such properties do not transfer, how can we attribute any art/expressive properties to musical works? We are also perhaps forced to view performance-­driven properties as akin to mistakes, for we need to say things like “‘My Favorite Things’ is a lilting, happy work, while this performance was brooding and sad.” How can this not be seen as a mistake, or, at a bare minimum, an aesthetic fault of the performance? Stronger still, would this not count against viewing this brooding performance as a performance of “My Favorite Things”? But it goes without saying that Coltrane’s performance, far from being mistaken and aesthetically flawed, is aesthetically exemplary, and surely not mistaken. It would be equally misguided to claim that the aesthetic interest in Coltrane’s performance is the precise quality of his mistakes—­his “My Favorite Things” is not an aesthetically interesting disaster; this is absurd.40 Perhaps some mileage can be gained from such a position when applied to Charlie Parker’s attempts to play “Lover Man” immediately prior to his nervous breakdown, but examples such as this are exceptions.41 One would be forced to view Coltrane’s genius as akin to a series of flubbed notes, unintended squeals, mistaken dynamics, and ill-­timed rhythms. As for option four, it also seems to be a cheat, in effect a refusal to consider how we can have it that Coltrane has performed what he seems to have performed. And, more generally, to deny he has performed “My Favorite Things” because his performance has aesthetic properties that are incompatible with those of the work itself is again to assume some vantage point from which one can judge the aesthetic properties of a musical work apart from 40.  Alternatively, we can claim that the musical work has very few, if any aesthetic properties in and of itself. This is, however, not in the spirit of the historicism Levinson and others wish to endorse. It may also suggest moving toward a form of musical work nominalism à la Goodman, where only scores and performances really exist. 41.  July 29, 1946, recorded by Dial.

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its performance tradition. One might try moving to a consideration of first performances, or “authorized” performances, but the problems with such positions are obvious and great—­it is clear that the properties we want to say a musical work may have are not all and only made manifest in any given performance, let alone a first one, and “authorized performances” suffer this same problem, and others besides.42 If all we are left with is option two, we are faced with a denial of historicism outright, or so it seems. Now one may very well want to argue against historicism, if not generally for artworks then at least for musical works, or perhaps for musical works from certain traditions. I am not sympathetic to the historicist’s position, nor am I convinced that Levinson’s argument leaves antihistoricists with no arrows in their quiver. However, there is another way of dissolving the incompatibility between historicism and what we seem to need to say about musical works from improvising traditions. Historicism, as Levinson presents it (and as all versions of it I am familiar with endorse), assumes that artworks are normally completed. While the time of completion might be unclear or contested, and while works may be revised and modified, the fixation of work properties, according to the historicist, is determined by the act of the work’s completion and makes no sense apart from such an act. If an artwork is not complete, then its art/aesthetic properties are still open to revision, still open to change. The very act of creating an artwork is the varying of the art/aesthetic properties of the artwork coming to be.43 Perhaps the best way to view how a musical work such as “My Favorite Things” is treated by the jazz community is as an ever-­evolving, ever-­ changing, never-­ completed work-­ in-­ progress. The crucial point is that completion is not a goal that has simply not yet been attained, so that the performances to date and the features such performances imbue the musical work with are somehow still not right, being preliminary, or mere sketches. They are temporary, perhaps transient, but fully formed and intentional. The performer/composer need not ever believe that they are somehow incorrect 42.  Consider: how could you independently establish that what appears to be a first performance of a given work is a performance of it at all unless you could independently judge that the art properties this performance manifests are in fact those that the work itself has or allows? 43.  It appears that there would be no reason to continue to work on a given artwork if one is not altering its art/aesthetic properties, unless one thinks that an artwork can have purely sensory properties (perhaps “pure” representational properties) that lack art/aesthetic value, but do make a difference, other than in a trivial way.

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or incomplete. It is not that the performer/composer has not yet decided that the work is complete, but rather that such a decision is never to be made or intended to be made.44 If the work is never completed, then by the historicist’s own lights, its properties need not be fixed. “My Favorite Things,” the musical work, was happy and is now sad (or, once was only happy and now is both). This model of the musical work, or more precisely the relationship of the musical work to its performances, includes a denial that musical works are completed, and so no incompatibility with historicism exists. One need not either endorse a full-­fledged rejection of historicism, or, say, view the performances as the creations of a series of distinct but related works, each with distinct but related properties.45 One might very well think that this is the right attitude to have even toward traditionally composed musical works in the Western art-­music tradition. One may rationally hold that compositions do not complete a work, or at least do not fix all the aesthetic properties of a work, and that only performance can accomplish this. This follows from the fact that scores are always but partial guides to the musical structure realized in performance, and aesthetically relevant properties supervene on the complete musical structure as sounded. Unless one has a very fixed notion of authoritative performance, distinct performances often evince distinct aesthetic properties, which one may very well want to claim hold of the work itself and not just the performance. If such a view is plausible for traditionally composed works, it is that much more attractive when considering the status of musical works in improvising musical traditions. In this sense all musical works evolve or change, with works issuing from traditions that foreground impro44.  There may be some value in comparing this model of a musical work and its performances to species (viewed as kinds) and individual members of a species, given an evolutionary model of species. It makes no sense to ask if a species is complete, because it changes or evolves by virtue of changes in its members. Yet we can still meaningfully ask if a given individual is a member of a given species. 45.  Consider Ornette Coleman’s claim that in “a certain sense there really is no start or finish to any of my compositions. There is a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving stands of thought that link all my compositions together” (my emphasis) (Change of the Century). A point that goes undiscussed among those who believe that musical works, or artworks more generally, are completed and in this sense brought into existence at a given moment by a certain act, is the ontic status of everything that precedes. Platonists of all sorts will have to claim that even the smallest change in the conception of a given music work during its composition, its “working out,” is, as a matter of metaphysical fact, actually the actualization, indication, or consideration (or what have you) of a series of discrete musical works, each a distinct Platonically conceived musical structure.

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visation perhaps being more plastic than others.46 The distinction may be this—­Afrological aesthetics recognizes and theorizes the evolving nature of musical works via their performance, while the aesthetics developed to make sense of Western composed music tend to be Platonist or historicist. Recently, the question of when and if artworks are complete has come under renewed scrutiny by sociologists of art.47 Many now reject the assumption that the question of whether a given artwork is completed, or was intended to be so, is always open to an easy answer. It is worth engaging with this literature. However there is a way to convince the historicist that what one has with “My Favorite Things” and similar cases is a work constantly in the process of being created. This falls out of the modal model sketched above, and so is independent of the rather revisionist view on the part of some sociologists. For the moment a historicist can pick when a musical work has been created is just when the set of the work’s possible future performances has been fixed. This follows from Levinson’s own account of the musical work. For Levinson and others, musical works are metaphysical “types,” and what a musical work considered as a type does is establish a set of possible performances by virtue of laying down changeless rules for instancing the work in performance.48 But this is precisely what the modal model denies—­there is no moment when this set of possible performances is fixed, and so the work itself is not, in this sense, completed.49 Historicism and the modal model can coexist, so far as considerations of work property instantiation go. If one believes that the modal model holds for much so-­called jazz music, among perhaps other types of music, then such practices seem to be best viewed as those where the musical work itself is never completed and is 46.  Consider an analogy with sports, where the rules of a sport are akin to the score of a musical work. You can discern very few affective properties of a sport from its rules, and it is only instances of the sport, actual games, that may be exciting, tense, lyrical, athletic, dramatic, or what have you. 47.  See Becker, Faulkner, and Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Art from Start to Finish. This collection, for all its interest, will not be wholly satisfactory for those interested in the ontological status of artworks with respect to their completion. 48.  Accounts of musical works as types see them as “property binders” that fix a class of performances that manifest these properties. For a full account of musical works as such types see Dodd, Works of Music. 49.  To put this point differently, to view musical works as changeless types entails denying the modal model. Acceptance of the modal model means that if you think musical works in any sense can exist as changeless Platonic entities, you must think that they never actually achieve this status since they are always in the act of being created, and so strive for but never achieve their Platonic perfection.

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constantly being revised by performance, precisely by having performances make possible differing sets of future performances. On this account, musical works are constantly modified by performance, and the notion of an authoritative performance is denied.50 This question of when and under what conditions an artwork is finished has recently received attention from the philosophers of art Darren Hick and Paisley Livingston.51 While they are not primarily concerned with musical works, much of what they say is intended to be generalizable, and it is worth considering both how their respective theories might help us and how improvisation may suggest modifications to or problems with their positions. Hick and Livingston, while essentially taking similar tacks, disagree about this—­Livingston presents what he sees as a necessary condition (and perhaps a necessary and sufficient condition) for an artwork being complete, while Hick denies there can be necessary conditions, presenting what he sees as a sufficient condition. Both of their accounts are, correctly I think, intentionalist; an artist’s judgment or decision that their work is complete is crucial to the work being complete. Both Hick and Livingston proceed by producing counterexamples to each other’s positions—­presenting increasingly outré situations where the other’s theory seems not to match “our” intuitions about work completion. I do not mean to imply that such exercises are without value, but what can be lost in all this is why we might be interested in this question in the first place—­what hinges on whether or not an artwork is complete? All the cases that Hick and Livingston raise are cases where we might be mistaken about the moment of a work’s completion, and so we are forced to reconsider assorted beliefs we may have formed about the work. Surely this is of interest, since to discover that a work was not completed that we thought was completed (and so we formed beliefs about an incomplete work), or that a work we thought was incomplete actually was complete (and so we may have put off forming certain beliefs about the work), can have serious 50.  There is still room for a notion of an authoritative performance, but not one with musical-­work-­fixing effects. A given performance may influence many other future performances, it may radically alter the future performance history of a work, it may tend to ossify future performances, and so on. Yet unless a given performance somehow makes it that all future performances must sound like it, it is not authoritative in the ontologically relevant manner. 51.  Hick, “When Is a Work of Art Finished?”; Hick, “A Reply to Paisley Livingston,”; Livingston, “Counting Fragments”; and Livingston, “When Is a Work Finished?”

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ramifications concerning, broadly speaking, how we relate to this work and relate it to others. Yet what is also of interest is to consider whether there might be a class of art practices that, given the theories of artwork completeness under consideration, regularly fail to produce completed works, or may positively intend not to produce completed works. Both Hick and Livingston choose not to consider this question. Perhaps some improvised musical works are like this—­did Coltrane, given his many varied performances of, say, “Impressions,”52 ever take that musical work to be complete? A related point is this: both Hick and Livingston take their respective theories to present objective criteria for work completeness. Might not a work be complete for a given individual or community and not for another, or from a certain perspective and not from another? Denying this surely requires argument. Hick presents the following sufficient condition for a work being completed: “Provided no explicit declaration by the artist to the contrary, publication of a work with the artist’s consent is a sufficient condition of that work being finished.”53 Livingston worries about questions of sincerity and coercion with respect to questions of an artist declaring their work complete and/or publishing their work (where publication is taken broadly as the making public of one’s work via whatever is the standard media and method). In light of this, Hick is happy to add “uncoerced” before “consent” in his definition. Both Livingston and Hick therefore think that publication enters into establishing the completeness of an artwork. We read the following in Livingston: A work is finished just in case the artist, working in the absence of severe coercion, makes the extended completion decision, and either (1) the artist consents to make the work available to a public and the work is actually published (where the public is not solely comprised of the artist and his or her friends and family), or (2) the artist does not consent to publication, but does not subsequently override the completion decision and make or authorize additional changes incompatible with that prior decision.54 Now such attempts at necessary and sufficient conditions tend to encour52.  A work he wrote, and so issues surrounding the revision of the work by someone other than the composer do not enter. 53.  Hick, “When Is a Work of Art Finished?” 74. 54.  Livingston, “When Is a Work of Art Finished?” 394.

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age an often sterile exercise in counterexample-­mongering. Yet for our purposes, it might be worth considering some. When is coercion severe? Many jazz musicians record versions of their tunes with little time for rehearsal, and perhaps with little control over the musicians employed or the repertoire to be recorded. Artists such as Mingus long complained that their works were intended either for large ensembles that they never had the financial means to employ, or for a set of musicians different from those actually employed. Jazz musicians would (and still do) regularly record pieces solely to honor an existing contract, or simply because they were in dire need of some cash (usually very little, and often less than they were promised).55 Are these cases of often institutionalized coercion severe? If they are the norm, do they become noncoercive? Many artists ply their trades within cultural and social contexts that rarely afford them the luxury of working wholly at their own pace and under conditions of their own choosing. Performing arts are particularly well suited to having artists, however begrudgingly, allow performance/publication of their work prior to the moment they would, all things being equal, choose to have them performed/published.56 This is due to the fact that performances, as events, can be repeated and altered while one can still benefit, financially and otherwise, from a prior performance. Certain recording artists authorize the release of what otherwise would be considered bootleg recordings, often of live concerts, rehearsals, and the like, knowing that they will circulate independently of their official authorization. Is this coercion, and does such authorized publication yield completed works? Was a “completion decision” made? Livingston’s model seems better suited than Hick’s to cases such as these. Considering Livingston’s proposal, what are we to say about the “a public that is not limited to friends and family” clause? The point, I take it, is to preclude the publication of a work simply by showing it to a close circle of one’s associates. Yet we can easily imagine situations where that is the only form of publication available—­perhaps works produced by banned artist groups under repressive regimes. Do we really need to decide whether someone is a friend (what if you are friendly with everyone in your perhaps limited community?) to judge a work to have been published? 55.  Consider, for example, Count Basie’s contract with Decca prior to his signing with Columbia. Or the debacle that was Mingus’s performance of new works at Carnegie Hall, where transcribers were on stage, and the score was, seemingly, being written right then and there. 56.  Performance and publication may split apart if publication is equated with score publication, and not with performance as a form of publication. Yet for many popular musical forms publication is to be equated with performance and/or recording.

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What is crucial in Livingston’s account is the notion of an “extended completion decision.” This is a decision an artist might make to refrain from making any further changes to a work because they judge the work to be good enough for their “work-­making” purposes. For Livingston, if one has decided that one’s work is complete, and then one publishes it, one has reached the point of no return, the properties of the work are “locked in,” and the work is fixed. Any further revisions to the work in effect produce a new work.57 This completion decision may often be a wholly private matter, and so whether a work is completed may not be open to public scrutiny. This point, in keeping with my general tendencies to privilege artist intention, demands that one interrogate the notions of “intending to refrain from further changes to a work” and judging a work to be “good enough.” These may also be opaque, even to the artist herself. I believe that, as a matter of fact, many artists never make such judgments or have such intentions. Be that as it may, I think it is clear such intentions and judgments are lacking, and consciously so, with many works in the jazz tradition.58 One needs to be careful about what one is talking about when considering work in such jazz-­related contexts. One may never touch, that is revise, the sheet music (if it exists), yet one can clearly modify the work in perfor57.  Is publication meant to have special ontological powers? Or is the point that publication is, as a matter of cultural fact, often taken to be the hallmark of completeness? If the latter, one would need detailed sociological or art-­historical evidence to support such a position. If the former, one is left puzzled as to how publication brings about such an ontological effect. 58.  What counts as having an intention is at issue here. Yet assuming that this can be decided, why not just consider the presence of the “extended completion decision” as sufficient for a work being complete? Presumably Livingston thinks that artists can sometimes override this decision, and so have it that the work under consideration was not complete after all. However, this decision, coupled with publication (under the appropriate conditions) makes completion irrevocable. Why add this? Tense may be important here. Does a decision that a work is not complete, made temporally subsequent to a decision that it was, make it that the work never was complete after all, or that the work was complete, but now is not (and yet may be, again, in the future)? Why have it that a public act, that of publication, makes work creation either unchangeable or shows that work creation has really taken place? Such a criterion does allow there to perhaps be conditions under which individuals other than the artist herself can know that a work is complete, yet why require that there be this epistemic guarantee? If Livingston’s position is that works were not, as a matter of fact, complete if the extended completion decision is subsequently overridden, but this only becomes the case at the moment of the overriding decision (a form, perhaps, of backward causation), then having publication fix a work’s completeness might be intended to indicate that works can be completed, and potentially known to be so, prior to the death of an artist (at which point, I take it, prior extended completion decisions can no longer be overruled!).

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mance over time, and often radically.59 Such composer/performers may feel that their works are never complete, and so always open to revision. In this sense they may never intend to refrain from making any further changes to the work. They may also think, on any given occasion, that the work as revealed in performance was good enough for their work-­making purposes at that moment. They may refrain from having work-­completion intentions because they feel the conditions are never such that they can complete the work to their satisfaction, or they may simply think as a matter of course that works in their chosen genre are, by their very nature, never complete (as Coltrane said, you always need to be “cleaning the mirror”).60 They may think this even if they publish the sheet music, record and name the work, and even sue others for copyright infringement. If this is correct, it raises a question: If jazz works that have ever-­changing performances are therefore always open to revision and so never completed, what can we definitely say about them—­the performances or the work? Must we forever hold off on making judgments about the work, saying “No, wait, it is not complete yet!”? This seems unsatisfactory and counter to the critical discourses concerning such music. This is where we may want to consider the possibility that works can be complete from a certain perspective, or for a given purpose, but not for others. Alternatively (and it may ultimately come down to the same thing), we may decide that there is more than one work on the scene with improvised performances of a piece—­the performance as a work, and the musical work it is a performance of. On this proposal, we can consider the performance as a completed work, but not the work it is a performance of.61 We may also decide that if we are to make judgments, aesthetic or otherwise, about a given work as repeatedly 59.  And sheet music itself exists and is used in a less fixed sense than many might assume. Fake Books (widely used collections of jazz standards) contain varied and contradictory sheet music of the same jazz standard. Performers’ scores are often heavily annotated. Composers revise and republish scores—­the status of a given score as authoritative is often under dispute. Louis Armstrong, who recorded “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926, is said to have, on dropping his sheet music, started to sing nonsense sounds, and so he invented scat singing; this scatted section is now standardly thought to be an essential part of the song’s performance! 60.  Some jazz artists, such as Mingus, would revise the names of their works—­“Fables of Faubus,” became, among other things, “New Fables of Faubus.” Others, such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, would, under the same name, perform radically different versions of a given work. 61.  Above we rejected a view that has it that such performances are only of distinct works. Now we are considering a model where they are both performances of distinct works and modifications of a given work.

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performed by an improvising musician, we must attend numerous performances, while the performance itself as a work can be judged, of course, in isolation.62 Our judgments themselves, like the work, need to be constantly open to revision. However the sense in which a performance may be a completed work is ill suited for analysis along the lines that Livingston proposes. One cannot change a performance once it has happened, and so one cannot intend to change it. Yet equally one need not judge one’s improvised performance to be “good enough” for anything; it simply exists, and must suffice for the purposes at hand once it is performed. An artist might retrospectively form the judgment that a given performance was subpar and, in a sense, disown it, but this hardly makes it less complete for that reason. One might try moving to some sort of counterfactual claim—­“I would not choose to alter anything with this performance given how it came out, were I able to do so”—­but it is difficult to imagine that any improviser, given the very nature of improvisation, would judge this to be the case. Or, alternatively, they may think that this is always the case, and that nothing should be changed, since the given improvisation is simply what it is—­a reflection and product of the improviser’s “being” while producing it. Either way, the conditions of completion seem different from those at play in nonimprovised arts. Put most generally, improvisation problematizes the whole notion of work completion. For the notion of a “completed work decision” seems to drop out.63 With both free improvisations and improvisations on existing works, such as “My Favorite Things,” there is no completed work decision, since work completion is simply not at issue. It is wrong to view the ever-­ changing performances of “My Favorite Things” as changes in a work awaiting its completion. Work performance in such a tradition is not in this sense teleologically driven; performances are not directed toward work completion via authoritative performance. With free improvisations there is, of course, 62.  That is not to say that the single hearing of a performance-­as-­work need be all that is needed to have an “understanding” of the work. This point is also often made by those considering the performance of composed music—­that more than one interpretation, that is performance, of a work needs to be considered before one can understand the work, since one might, while attending to any single performance, mistake features of the work itself for those that are actually wholly performer-­determined. One would be poorly positioned to discuss generalities about Coltrane’s approach to “My Favorite Things” based only on his initial recording of the work. 63.  Completion in such contexts seems equivalent to “temporally ends now,” since no acts of editing are possible.

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a moment of work creation, the moment the performance ends, but there is no extended completion decision per se. This may be another deep contrast with works created via score creation, where there may often be an extended work-­completion decision. The more one starts to puzzle, and get confused about whether there is one work on the scene, multiple works, performances and works, performances as works, etc., the more one sees the wisdom, and ontological simplicity, of claiming that traditions that regularly and intentionally radically alter the performances of works are best understood as putting the performances themselves into conversation with each other, and to the degree that there is an underlying work being performed, this work is best seen as undergoing, via its performances, continued change. One way to generalize this is to claim that Afrological arts, those that incorporate the notion of signifying are in a sense committed to the constant (re)creation of artworks. For what else is “repetition with a signal difference” other than the claim that the same work is present, but it has been changed—­that it is open to constant revision? The ontology of signifying strongly suggests the denial of work-­completion criteria, and can and should be seen as an alternative to those art traditions that do prioritize work completion. To the degree, and it is great, that the question of work completion effects radically the aesthetic properties of the work, this is yet another aspect of Afrological aesthetics grounded in ontology. By allowing works to be open to constant modification, such works can have varied aesthetic properties at varied times, due to their varied instantiations. Afrological ontology of art foregrounds an ontology of perpetual movement, powered by the expression of performer agency, while Western art tends to foreground an ontology of stasis. If signifying foregrounds the changing nature of musical works via their varied performance histories, the “modal model” explains how, and why, we view a given performance as of, and so signifying on, a given preexisting work.64 A given performance must be within the “field of possibilities” of the performance history of the given work, from the appropriate cultural perspective. Crucially, as we have seen, these perspectives vary and may well disagree about the content of these fields. Different musical communities, musical scenes, perspectives, discourses, etc., differ precisely insofar as they view these fields differently. For the modal model operates at varied levels of generality, from establishing whether or not a given performance is of a 64.  More precisely, it establishes necessary but not sufficient conditions for signifying to take place, because signifying is more than any old performance that is both related to past performances and effects changes in future performances.

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given work to whether or not a performance is an example of a certain genre of music (say, jazz), or if it is even music at all. Since one can get different answers to all these questions depending on the sociomusical perspective from which one makes the judgments, “what” a given sounding is taken to be—­a performance of “My Favorite Things,” a jazz performance, music at all, and so on—­is the result of a complex interaction between the auditory features of the given sounding, how these are represented by a given hearer, and the beliefs the hearer brings to bear on this sounding concerning genre identity, appropriate performance history, performer intentions, and so on. Each of these judgments has aesthetic ramifications, for the comparison class appropriate for judging the given work will vary, as will the history one sees the work as part of, and so crucially the future performances/works it makes possible. There are, of course, varied ways to decide from which perspective to judge a given performance ontologically, and so aesthetically. Many of these ways are highly contextual—­the venue a work is performed in, the performance series it is part of, the manner of dress of the performers and audience, the expected norms of behavior, accompanying program notes, prior beliefs one might have about the composers/performers, the history of their musical output, and other related beliefs (including beliefs that may well be grounded in racist, sexist, classist, or other forms of demeaning and pernicious thinking). One need not advocate some sort of extreme genre essentialism to claim that if one attends a Burt Bacharach concert (as I recently did) and judges it by the standards one would if attending a Nick Cave concert (attended a couple of nights prior), one would be making some sort of mistake. This is not to say that there are no similarities that cross these genres, but merely that the genre categories one deems in each case appropriate do have aesthetic ramifications and affect what constitutes proper understanding of the music under consideration.65 From the perspective of the modal model, what genre you ultimately choose to consider a given performance to be an example of (Las Vegas lounge music, postpunk dark rock) affects what field of possible future performances it creates, and what these future performances are, whether examples of that genre, or related to that genre in the appropriate fashion. 65.  Herein lies one of the great points of interest of cut-­and-­paste music styles such as hip-­ hop. By juxtaposing musics of distinct, and often competing, genres, we are forced to interrogate the nuanced ways that our aesthetic judgments are genre-­sensitive, and how context may radically change how we receive a given musical work, both what constitutes understanding of it, and its aesthetic value.

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We claimed earlier that avant-­garde works in a certain genre must have some relationship to the historical corpus of such works in that genre if they are to be taken to be aesthetically interesting advances of the genre. They must, in effect, be part of the modal field of possibilities the genre creates, even if they are in a sense difficult or barely possible to describe. Before turning to the concrete study of a number of improvised performances, we need to see how genre flexibility and the modal model suggest a notion of what I call “aesthetic denseness.” Aesthetic denseness can be seen as an archetypically postmodern aesthetic value, but one that resuscitates what is often seen as characteristic of modernity, a historical rootedness of artworks. Its employment by improvisers can be seen as a means of evincing their understanding of the musical work they are performing. These features of aesthetic denseness, and the fact that it is characteristic of many improvised performances/works of the jazz avant-­garde (particularly, I will argue, the AACM), will allow us to see how such artists bridge the gap between what is often seen as characteristic of new art from a European perspective with those aspects of black diasporic arts whose aesthetic tends to foreground features that, in the European context, find a more natural home in modernist discourse. We will also see how such a seemingly conservative (from one perspective at least) aesthetic gambit actually allows such improvising practices to aspire to the standards of art that the very postmodern theory of relational aesthetics hypothesizes as the goal of effective art.

Four

Paris, 1969 Musical Understanding, Genres, and Aesthetic Denseness Arguably one cannot perform a work without having some understanding of it—­this is obvious, yet understanding a work also seems to require, in a sense, an ability to perform the work, even if the performance is minimal—­ for example, just humming the melody silently to oneself.1 The performances of musical works are the sonic evidence of musical understanding, and differences between performances of the same work indicate differences, often subtle, between such understandings. The degree to which musical works are susceptible to a range of understandings will color the degree to which performances of them might vary. Yet one should not assume that the degree of epistemic plasticity that musical works evince (and so the degree to which performances of them may vary) is somehow wholly determined by the musical structure of the work, scored or otherwise. For, as we have seen, what counts as a legitimate understanding of a musical work as demonstrated by performance of the work will vary with the work’s reception and position within a given community of music consumers. One factor that enters into our determinations of musical understanding concerns genre judgments. The genre we consider a work or performance to be in will affect many of the features we take to be musically and aesthetically appropriate. A misunderstanding of a musical work might be based on a false genre judgment concerning the work.2 1.  Both performers as traditionally conceived, and audiences, if they understand a work, can perform it in this sense. How one understands a work also enters into judgments as to whether or not a given work has been performed, as we have seen. 2.  For example, if on first hearing Debussy’s La Mer, I take it to be an example of punk rock, I fail to understand the work.

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Genre categories are perhaps the most obvious example of a highly culturally indexed, fluid, and changeable ontological category. Genre categories multiply rapidly, often require insider knowledge to appreciate, and proliferate as musical scenes develop and change.3 Even those familiar with much popular music discourse can struggle to make sense of many musical genre terms. At one level, this is the point of genre terms; they serve as gatekeepers to musical and cultural subcommunities. You need to know what the terms designate to even know what sort of music a given dance club might be presenting. A way to indicate one’s cultural capital is to be au fait with the subtleties that accompany a genre designation. Yet genre designations are not just created by “insiders” to gatekeep their own cultural/social scene; they are often imposed from without via acts of cultural segregation. If acts of the former kind treat genre terms as the cultural equivalent of the doorman at an exclusive club, keeping the uninformed out, acts of the latter kind treat genre terms as the cultural equivalent of a prison guard, keeping the undesirables at bay. Here I want to focus on two important, and interpenetrating, functions of genre designations: their role in demarcating a given (even if imperfectly given) class of properties as being aesthetically relevant as opposed to some other class, and their role in fixing the history of musical production within which one is intended to embed a given performance/work. Genre terms help establish and prioritize what we are listening to and how we “should” listen to it. Once we know what sort of music we are listening to, we know, more or less, which properties of this music are to be foregrounded and which are less important.4 We also know what history the music at hand is best understood as emerging from and contributing to. Genre determinations, in this sense, help fix the limits of correct understanding.5 It follows from this that when our genre perspective is destabilized, so too is the basis of our understanding of the work in question. What will be crucial is that genre determinations not only affect the understandings that listeners bring to bear on musical works, they influence performer’s understanding too. How a performer chooses to perform 3.  See, for example, Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation.” 4.  If we know that the piece at hand is a disco dance piece, we know to focus on its rhythm and beat, and know that we are not intended to consider it against a background of the history of the sonata. This does not deny the possibility that other features of the disco piece might be of interest. 5.  Precisely how genre beliefs cognitively affect how we represent and process incoming musical perceptions is an interesting, and understudied, question in music cognition.

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a work, how they evince their understanding of it, is partially a product of the genre perspective they take toward the work. This can and often does vary from performance to performance, and can do so even within a given performance.6 As we shall see, this point can help us decide under what conditions a work is performed, for whether a given sounding is considered a performance of a work is based on the genre determinations one makes about the work and the performance. Different genre-­based communities of music consumers undoubtedly differ one from another based partially on their differing criteria of work performance. Consider what an audience of Deadheads might take to be a particularly compelling performance of “Dark Star,” even though, and partially because, it deviated greatly from the ur-­recording of the song.7 Fans of Taylor Swift would most likely be appalled to hear her perform “You Belong to Me” in a manner that deviates to the same degree from her recorded version. They may well not even be able to hear the song in this radical performance, and would no doubt judge it to be aesthetically flawed, perhaps fatally so. Genre determinations play this function in the understanding of art more generally. For art objects present us with a whole host of properties, only some of which are relevant to our judgments of them as art objects. Some of these properties might be thought of as purely perceptual, such as the color of a part of a painted canvas or the perceived volume of a piece of music, while others are often thought to be perceived but are considered the product of complex interpretation/representation. Examples might be music heard as being sad, or a painting seen as being of a tree. Other properties seem to rely much more on historical information, such as sounding like a performance was influenced by Coltrane or looking like an example of antifascist poster art. Problems demarcating the divisions between such property classes, and whether these are the correct classes to begin with, are both infamous and well discussed by others. For our purposes, the point is simply that art objects are redolent with properties, and only certain subsets

6.  For example, when the Grateful Dead first performed the song “Shakedown Street” live in the summer of 1978 it was met with derision by Deadheads, who heard it as a capitulation to the much-­hated disco craze. However, the song soon came to be a favorite of the same Deadheads, who came to hear it as featuring an improvised jam with more rhythmic drive than most Grateful Dead jams, and not as a disco piece. 7.  “Dark Star,” perhaps the most famous song vehicle for the Dead’s extended improvisations, was originally released as a two-­minute single in 1968. As performed live, the song would soon reach epic proportions, with some performances clocking in at over forty minutes.

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of these properties matter in aesthetic evaluations.8 Others are less suited for contributing to our interest in the objects.9 If we are mistaken about which properties deserve our attention, we are likely to fail to find the object aesthetically interesting. This would be a result of our failure to understand the object appropriately; we are looking for interest in the wrong places. To examine a Rothko canvas for its representational fidelity, or to listen to medieval monody for its harmonic complexity, would be examples of such mistakes and so produce failures to appreciate the art works so scrutinized. But of course, representational fidelity and harmonic complexity are interesting properties of other artworks. It is not that these properties are not of art interest per se, they just are not of interest in these particular cases. Two art objects that manifest very similar properties might not have very similar aesthetically interesting properties. The patina and encrustations on an excavated Etruscan bronze may be something we try to abstract away, being seen as properties that interfere with our ability to judge the object aesthetically (although they may not always so interfere), while the same properties when found in an Anselm Kiefer installation may enter crucially into our aesthetic judgments of the artwork. If we mistake the bronze for a Kiefer, or vice versa, our understanding of the objects may well be mistaken. Musical genres are a very particular kind of ontological category, yet they do still operate as a kind of answer to the “What is it?” question. With music, the genre one takes a given performance to be representative of creates boundaries, even if they are porous, between the properties of the performance that aesthetically matter and those that don’t, and affects to what degree they matter. They help determine which properties are of interest and direct our attention toward them. It is plausible to think, all things being equal, that the more aesthetically interesting properties an object has, and so the more properties that might serve as a focus to our interest, the better. Of course, aesthetic interest and value are not merely a function of the number of aesthetically interesting properties an object manifests; such aesthetic “number theory” is useless, for a painting whose aesthetic interest is almost 8.  Of course, it also matters what sort of aesthetic theory one is operating with. A high formalist will consider a different set of properties as of potential aesthetic interest than will someone steeped in performance art and relational aesthetics. 9.  The account developed here is intended to partially answer a question raised by Aaron Ridley in “Bleeding Chunks,” who recognizes that it is difficult to determine which properties of the performance of a musical work need to enter our understanding of the work. I claim that genre positionality is crucial for the demarcation of such properties.

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totally due to its use of color is not necessarily less aesthetically interesting than one that also has interesting representational content. But the latter painting may allow one ways to find value in the painting that the former does not, and it may suggest a richer set of contexts and histories to relate it to, and so may attract a greater range of art consumers. In effect, there are more ways of understanding the latter painting, more cognitive opportunities to appreciate it.10 I want to argue that a sort of “meta-­aesthetic” property that an object may have is its appropriateness to be viewed from a number of genre perspectives, effectively thickening the interest-­inducing properties such an object might have. Although we just saw that manifesting more aesthetically interesting properties need not, in itself, make for a more aesthetically interesting object tout court, such aesthetic thickening is, I think, very likely to increase the overall aesthetic interest of such objects. This is because it multiplies whole families of interesting properties that such objects have. This is, in itself, such an interest-­bearing property, because different genre perspectives suggest different sets of properties that are stipulated to be of aesthetic interest, and different histories of art production that a given art object is related to and that it may be expanding.11 Even if one is not convinced by the claim that aesthetically denser objects are likely to be more interesting than less-­dense objects, such aesthetically thick objects can discharge an important function that thinner objects cannot. Such aesthetically thick objects may have quite different sets of properties that are aesthetically valuable when considered from distinct genre perspectives. This allows them to place into dialogue, so to speak, these distinct sets of properties and so cause one to pause to consider the reasons behind their distinctiveness, why each genre perspective prioritizes one set of properties over another, and both why and how one chooses to take one genre perspective as opposed to another. Such objects suggest an interrogation 10.  Works with few aesthetically interesting properties may well be masterpieces, but may also appear to be aesthetically hermetic to those who are not particularly sensitive to or appreciative of their (limited) aesthetic properties. Aesthetically dense works can “open up” to more people, and can perhaps draw their attention to aesthetic value where they have previously not found any. In this sense such works may be seen as being less elitist than those with far fewer aesthetically valuable properties. 11.  Note that these claims are not an endorsement of any particular account of aesthetic properties (such as formalism). Color and representational content are just examples. Whatever it is that you think art is for, the more ways an art object satisfies this function, the better, all else being equal.

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of aesthetics itself, and such an interrogation may well reveal the cultural, social, and political networks of beliefs, practices, and prejudices behind our genre choices. Objects that are aesthetically dense in this sense also serve to question existing aesthetic categories and theories in an interesting way. If an object suggests consideration from a number of genre perspectives, and these perspectives are historically at odds with each other, having distinct discourses, histories, and art properties that are found to be meaningful, then it serves as a site for the comparative examination of these discourses and the art worlds out of which they emerge. Such works raise questions about the fixity of genre perspectives, the tacit or explicit ways we form hierarchies of art, the historical perspectives from which we make aesthetic judgments, and the whole matrix of political realities that often determine just how we consider a given genre of art. Such objects reflect back on us our own understandings, both positive and prejudicial, that we bring to bear in the evaluation of art objects by forcing us to realize the often-­divergent criteria we apply once we fix a genre and just how arbitrary such genre judgments themselves can be. We may well find ourselves interrogating the criteria we reflexively use to place the art created by certain individuals or communities into one genre category as opposed to another. This may reveal essentializing assumptions we make about art and artistic production. By forcing us to examine our art-­critical discourses such objects discharge a social function, since such discourses are a product of a social/ cultural position. This social position may be determined by a commitment to a particular form of theorizing, “formalism” for example; to a kind of metadiscourse, such as “postmodernism”; or to a location in a particular cultural space, such as a particular “art world” à la Danto, or a habitus à la Bourdieu, among other factors. The point is that our critical discourses are a product of, and are responsive to, social realities and positions. Acts of aesthetic thickening therefore serve a social function and may both comment on and reflect political realities. Crucial in what follows is an argument to the effect that aesthetically thick works in the sense sketched above can be seen as a characteristic of Afrological artworks, being grounded in the multivocality so often cited as a common Afrological aesthetic trope. Moreover, I make a link between the historical grounding of this multivocality—­slavery and its legacy, and its often pernicious fracturing of the sense of identity of those on the receiving end—­and the ability of such thick aesthetic works to call into question the essentializing thinking behind racism. I will show that aesthetically thick

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works are anti-­essentialist and therefore call into question more generally essentialist thinking, including racial essentialism in general and more specifically the way it plays itself out with respect to assumptions about the musical genres associated with African diasporic musical production. An important movement in Afrological improvised music, I argue, situates itself around such acts of aesthetic thickening, being well aware of the anti-­ essentialist position such works and artistic attitudes endorse. This too can be seen as a feature of much Afrological aesthetics. I argue that such aesthetic thickening is related to, but crucially different from, what is often seen as a characteristically postmodern art feature: the prominence of works whose pastiche-­like qualities do not afford the consumer a single (or any) fixed perspective from which to aesthetically judge them. Sometimes this is intended to yield the erasure of aesthetics. However, aesthetically dense works of the sort we have been describing throw our aesthetic theories themselves into dialogue with each other, and rather than yielding the erasure or failure of aesthetic judgment, they yield the interrogation of such judgments. Aesthetically dense works, which may not manifest formal pastiche-­like properties, recognize that we are always cognitively pastiche-­like when it comes to aesthetic judgments—­we operate with a patchwork of often conflicting sets of aesthetic criteria chosen largely based on genre judgments. To generalize, while the erasure of aesthetics is sometimes seen as a goal of one strand of European postmodern art production, often brought about by pastiche and its resultant multiplicity of genre styles, aesthetically thick works emerging out of an Afrological aesthetic are not intended to denude art of its aesthetic content so much as to have us interrogate our aesthetic assumptions and their often political underpinnings. It is thinking about aesthetics that becomes pastiche-­like, and we need to explore this inner pastiche that is, I think, ultimately more interesting and important to our relationship to art than pastiche as a formal feature of artworks. I want therefore to examine more carefully how genres help fix sets of interesting properties, and how art objects that invite consideration from a number of genres are therefore aesthetically thickened. I suggest that this helps explain the function and interest of avant-­garde art practices in general, and demonstrate this via the example of the music of a particular organization, the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and closely associated musicians. I end by arguing that this aesthetic thickening discharges the political functions of advocating anti-­essentialism with respect not only to art but to race as well, and that seeing this connec-

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tion is not just a theoretical construct but can be grounded in the AACM’s thinking about their own art. Genre determinations not only help fix the horizon of the aesthetically relevant properties of a musical performance, but they help establish the possible performances of a musical work from the perspective of the modal model sketched earlier, for genre determinations enter crucially into our projection of possible performances of musical works based on the genre in which we view the work. In this sense too, genre judgments are ontological, even if the ontology is often powered by politics. As we shall see, disputes concerning the “correct” genre from which to judge a work or performance are at their root ontological disputes, since they concern, among other things, the projective class of possible future performances or forms the work might take, as with the modal model. If we take a work to be firmly rooted in the be-­bop tradition, then we allow a certain range of future soundings to count as performances of the work. Of course, we may countenance the possibility of non-­be-­bop performances of the work but, again, our genre commitment may preclude this.12 These functions of genres are not independent, for genres affect the probabilities we give to how music may proceed precisely because they help establish the set of properties such music foregrounds as important, as well as the ways it tends to manipulate these properties. But such disputes are often powered by political considerations, genre ontology being determined by assumptions made about race, class, gender (among other social categories), and art production. From the perspective of the modal model and how it maps on to the cognitive processes at play in our perception of music, genre beliefs clearly affect our expectations of what is to follow in a particular piece of music, given what we have heard and are hearing. If we take what we are hearing to be a punk anthem, we would be very surprised if it suddenly resolved into a sprightly waltz, with smooth-­flowing legato violin lines. As we saw in our discussion of the modal model, structurally similar reasoning is at play in creating the expectations we have for what distinct performances of a given work might sound like. The plasticity we might consider in the possible performances of a given work vary genre to genre. To repeat a point made earlier, jam-­band renditions of certain songs, as performed by, say, the Grateful Dead, allow for far greater variability in performance than we would 12.  The point here is epistemic. Some may refuse to consider, say, a smooth jazz version of the punk classic “God Save the Queen” to be a performance of the work at all, since they may refuse to consider it possible that this work can receive a nonpunk treatment. For a discussion of this point see Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, Chapter Four.

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consider for a work from the genre of Romantic European art music. Were a performer of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto to take the same liberties with the work as scored as Jerry Garcia might with “Morning Dew,” or Coltrane with “My Favorite Things” for that matter, we would not take it that the concerto was successfully performed, that is, performed at all.13 What follows from this is that genre determinations strongly color work-­ performance judgments, along with judgments concerning the aesthetic relevance of certain properties of a given performance. A refusal to consider certain sonic (or, for that matter, performative, historical, etc.) features of a given performance to be aesthetically relevant or valuable, and whether or not one even considers a given performance to be of a particular work, or of any work at all, may be due in no small part to a refusal to view the performance from a certain genre perspective. Genre disputes have aesthetic ramifications, and again, are ontological disputes with social and political effects, themselves often grounded in social and political presuppositions. I want now to discuss some concrete examples of how genre determinations enter into the aesthetic thickening of musical performances, before returning to the ramification of this for questions of ontology. For we still need to see how what we take musical understanding to be, or at least to (partially) involve, might affect what we allow performances of musical works to sound like. I also want to demonstrate how acts of aesthetic thickening, insofar as they may result from genre multiplication, can have social and political instrumentality that may be less than obvious. It is important to note that genre multiplication can be internal to a given work or performance (it may reference assorted genres), or be in effect through the course of an album or multiwork performance, or best be revealed via the total artistic output of a given performer or ensemble. How knowledgeable one is of a given ensemble’s performance and recording history may well determine if and how one views a given performance or recording as aesthetically thickening their corpus via genre multiplication. Aesthetic denseness might accrue as a result of genre multiplication in a number of distinct ways. A performance may include sonic passages that bear the hallmarks of certain distinct musical genres, and so may invite one 13. In Emotion and Meaning Meyer develops a model of musical understanding based on the degree to which our understanding of a given piece of music affects our expectations of what is to follow. For Meyer, the function of musical understanding is, among other things, to allow us to have a coherent musical experience when hearing music performed. His notion of musical style is very much like what I am arguing for here, as judgments of style are to be closely assimilated to the probabilities we give to possible ways the music might go.

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to understand them from varied genre perspectives. These passages need not be successive; they may be simultaneous or related to each other in any number of ways. Crucially, the manner in which a musical passage may suggest a given genre perspective might not be based solely on how the passage sounds, but may be grounded in extramusical considerations. If, for example, a musician usually strongly identified with a certain genre (say hard-­bop jazz) performs with others from a distinct genre (say jam-­band rock), and in some obvious sense in the style of this distinct genre, one may still discover that one’s expectations of how the music may unfold, and what one aurally fixates on, is partially determined by what an understanding of hard-­bop entails.14 There are many other ways that a given performance may suggest, via internal means, that it be understood from multiple genre perspectives, yet external ways are also of crucial importance. What I mean by this is that the history of a given ensemble’s performances and compositions; the discourse they and others use to critically examine their music; the venues, festivals, and labels they are associated with; the precise programs of music they create; the liner notes to their albums; and so on may all contribute to either narrowing or widening the range of genre perspectives appropriate for understanding their musical output.15 However, histories are often sites of contestation, and the discourses applied to the music of a given artist may vary widely from critic to critic, or community to community, based on what histories of the music one endorses. To the degree that these discourses and histories help fix the range of appropriate genres from which to understand some given music, and given that such understandings help fix the range of aesthetically valuable properties of such music, divergent discourses and histories may well yield divergent judgments of the music’s aesthetic worth, which may in turn affect judgments of ontological and political import.16 The political colorings and effects of these judgments cut both ways: the history from which you choose to judge a given performance is often itself 14.  Consider the genre judgments one makes when a musician identified as a jazz artist sits in with the Allman Brothers Band and modifies their playing accordingly. 15.  The case of the Modern Jazz Quartet is instructive, as they seemed to invite consideration and critique from a classical music perspective, based partially at least on their choices of both clothes and venues. Were they rejecting the jazz world and jazz understandings of their music, or thickening their own practices? 16.  For example, if (as with the Frankfurt School) one takes newness or originality as the primary aesthetic property that allows art to be politically liberatory, precisely what history one places a work within will crucially affect whether the work is considered original.

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a highly politically charged judgment, and it thereafter affects the aesthetic relevance of the performance. Once such a judgment has been made, the resultant aesthetic perspective deemed appropriate from which to judge the performance often determines the particular aesthetic value one finds in the performance, which in turn can both involve, and lead to, further political judgments about the performance and the performers, for such judgments now become part of the work’s history and affect future judgments. When such judgments go unexamined, this circle becomes self-­justifying, and the political assumptions underlying an initial genre designation can serve to reinforce this assumption by either valorizing or dismissing the art at hand. For example, to consider a particular jazz performance solely from the position and history of Western art music is a decision both based on, and itself, a political viewpoint. A result of making such a determination may well be to form negative judgments about the aesthetic value of such works (and indeed about their social/political value!), which itself may be a judgment with profound social/political ramifications. This is, in very broad strokes, the kind of reasoning Adorno advances with respect to his critique of jazz and popular music. I have been speaking of “the” genre perspective from which one judges a given performance, but aesthetically dense works problematize the notion of a fixed genre perspective. Even in cases where genre shuffling is not extreme, such as the hard-­bop sax player sitting in with the jam band, one may find one’s perspective rapidly vacillating between that which one employs with jam bands and that which one employs with hard bop. Depending on how you view the sax player’s contributions—­that is, from what genre perspective you consider it—­you might almost simultaneously hear it as a simplified and perhaps banal version of hard-­bop playing or as an inspired “jazzy” addition to the rest of the band, adding tone color and harmonic complexity. The more radically dense the given performance might be, the more one comes to consciously recognize one’s shifting genre perspectives, and one may find oneself very much in the same cognitive state that highly pastiche-­like works of art induce, but here the cause of the cognitive interference is also internal, being a result of how you choose to hear the music. I want to turn now to some concrete examples, but first let me summarize what I hope to accomplish in the following section. I hope to show that collective acts of genre multiplication as undertaken by improvising ensembles are partially constitutive of the construction of collective identities, insofar as genre positions involve the embedding of music into particular, and often contested, histories of musical production and reception. Since genre cat-

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egories are essentially ontological categories—­for genre designations affect, among other things, the properties members of the genre must have and should have, and so affect what an understanding of them is constituted by—­we will see a tight connection between ontological determinations and the social/political instrumentality of the music under consideration. I will show, in some detail, how this aesthetic thickening via genre multiplication has both aesthetic and political/ethical ramifications and, ultimately, how this is grounded in an ontology of improvisation that itself accords nicely with the modal model, and what I will call an epistemic model of work performance. What will emerge from this is a particular way in which ontological/epistemological, political/ethical, and aesthetic issues are intertwined. By virtue of what characteristics might one identify oneself as a member of a given group or community, be it based on national, ethnic, religious, cultural, social, or other criteria?17 What makes “a community” just that, and, importantly, why might one want to be identified as a member of a given group of people? Of particular concern to us is what may follow from such membership at the level of moral and ethical concern. Most generally, the question becomes “What binds a people together so that they identify themselves, and are identified by others, as forming a distinctive community?” A full discussion of these questions is beyond our scope, but the role of music (particularly collective improvising), memory, and history in community formation is crucial for the argument presented here. Of some interest is the realization that many of the criteria used to fix musical genres are also employed more generally to demarcate communities from one another. In many ways musical genres are created, evolve, and are contested and modified just like social communities, which can almost be considered “anthropological genres.”18 As with musical genres, one often appeals to a common history for a group where those who share this history are bound together as a people, and where community membership is in an important way grounded in the shared history of the members of the community. Such shared historical narratives can be used by the members of a 17.  This discussion draws from both Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s review of it in the New York Review of Books. 18. The relationship between musical genres and communities is very intimate, since musical scenes (communities, in a sense) often spring up around musical genres. Indeed, the interrelations between scenes and genres is so close that one cannot often clearly say which came first. A musical genre often develops hand in hand with the growth of a community that valorizes that music. See Straw, “Systems of Articulation” on musical scenes.

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given community to ground their mutual solidarity with each other, or they can be imposed from without in ways that may have politically pernicious intent. Nations often rely on such histories to create a sense of nationhood among their citizens. Yet a given history is not, in any robust sense, the history of the individuals who now constitute a given group. I am an American, although I did not fight a perhaps-­just war against the British in the eighteenth century, nor did I help frame the Constitution or participate in the slave trade, all parts of Americans’ common history.19 My shared history, my Americanness, is a function of a shared historical narrative or story. I am not bound to my fellow Americans so much by what has actually happened in the past, both what happened to myself and my fellow Americans and what we ourselves actually did, as I am by what historical narratives I and my fellow Americans remember and what we choose to forget, and how we remember and forget. We construct narratives of “our” past via memory, forgetting, fact, and fantasy. Crucially, and I shall return to this point, such narratives themselves, as social constructions, are open to constant revision, and as they are revised, the arrays of collective memories one may share shift accordingly.20 One way to put this point is to say that the memory of a people is at the core of what it is to be that people.21 Yet to reiterate, “a people” in this sense does not have a memory, any more than it has eyes or ears. However stories can be shared, and these are kept alive, passed on, and constructed in books, newspapers, and classrooms, on screens and street corners, on canvas and with music. Cultural histories form important parts of these community narratives, particularly of minority peoples, who may no longer have the 19.  More recently I have become a Canadian citizen, and while proud of this status, I share little history of “Canadianness” with many of my fellow Canadians. 20.  For example, I and my fellow Brooklynites bemoan the spineless exodus of the Dodgers to L.A. in the middle of the night. This is surely a defining memory for Brooklynites everywhere, yet I do not actually remember it, because it was never present for me. This role of historical narratives in collective identities was forcefully made by the French Historian Ernest Renan in 1882 in his lecture “Qu’est-­ce qu’une nation?” (delivered at the Sorbonne, March 11, 1882), and seems spot on. Many countries recognize this role of collective history as storytelling; witness the importance of, and often heated debate surrounding, national history curricula in state schools. The recent debates that have reemerged concerning the Confederate battle flag—­what it stands for, and what is the content of the history it references—­make this point very clear. 21.  Stuart Hall states that “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.” Cited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his essay “The Black Man’s Burden,” 77.

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power or opportunity to effect large-­scale changes in the majority culture but can still partake in, and control changes to, distinctive local cultural customs, using them to preserve and modify their collective sense of self. If collective memory is as the heart of the identity of peoples and nations, it suggests asking “What is it, insofar as we are members of a given people, that we ought to remember, or forget?” This is, as the philosopher Avishai Margalit argues, in effect an ethical question—­are we morally obliged to remember “our” past? On whom does this obligation fall?22 For example, Jews talk of the Shoah, Armenians of the Turkish massacre, African Americans of slavery—­all as memories that “their people” have a moral obligation to keep and pass on, for these memories are essential to the formation of the community of memory that, at its root, is partially constitutive of being a Jew, Armenian, or African American.23 An important ethical reason that our group membership may be important is that it fixes whether we have thin or thick (as moral theorists say) relations with someone. Thin relations require merely that both parties be, say, human. One may very well think that certain moral obligations accrue simply on being so thinly related to someone—­for example, an obligation to save them from drowning or help them if they are injured or sick. Thick relations are grounded in relations such as being a blood relative, friend, lover, fellow Brooklynite, and so on, and many of these are partially constructed by collective memories. The distinct and more robust moral obligations we may have to those we are thickly related to therefore depend on those with whom we share a collective memory, and what that memory might be. Recognition of the fact that the “closer” someone is to us—­the more intimate the community we share in common—­the thicker are our moral bonds to them, goes back to antiquity. Stoic moral theory compels us, insofar as we are potentially virtuous agents, to have thick relations with as many people as we can.24 And it suggests a method of accomplishing this, urging us to practice considering as many as one can to be members of one’s most intimate communities. If we care about those to whom we are thickly related, then increasing the number of people we have thick relations with will increase the number of people we have special reason to care about, and who care about us. If 22.  See Margalit, The Ethics of Memory. 23. Such community memories need not be valuable only for these reasons since, for example, the history of slavery still affects the political, social, and cultural status of African Americans—­it is, in this sense, still present and not merely a memory. 24.  For example, see, Cicero, On Ends, 3.62–­68; Hierocles (Stobaeus 4.671,7–­673,11); Anonymous commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus, 5.18–­6.31.

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our thick relations are, to a great extent, fixed via shared memories, such “communities of memory” become morally crucial. And if such communities are constructed by the identity-­fixing stories of our histories—­that is, our collective memories—­then all such acts of identity construction are morally crucial, for they serve either to “let in” more to the circle of those to whom one is thickly related, or to exclude them from this circle. Thus, shared memories play a moral role insofar as our thick moral relations are both constituted by them and are “improved” when they exist in a context with such memories. For shared memories are tied to caring; we care for those to whom we are thinly related without such memories out of a sense of obligation, while we care for those we share such memories with out of a sense of solidarity and closeness. Belonging to a community of memory with someone can affect the moral bonds you have with that person in a number of ways. Often the claim is that such membership naturally results in an inclination to care for fellow community members. However, such common group membership may also have a prescriptive character. That is to say, one might appeal to common community membership to argue for the claim that closer bonds of caring should exist than as a matter of fact do. Foregrounding common community membership via the recognition of the acceptance of a common historical narrative could be taken to entail the need for a certain degree of mutual care and respect, and when such care and respect is as a matter of fact lacking, such recognition of common community membership could be taken as an argument for increasing the bonds of caring. Music’s instrumentality in such identity construction is well summarized by Lawrence Kramer: Music has the power to give its makers and auditors alike a profound sense of their own identities, to form a kind of precious materialization of their most authentic selves, in the mode of both personal and group identity. But at the same time music has the power to alienate the sense of both types of identity by carrying its makers and auditors across thresholds of difference that at least unsettle the sense of identity and may even undo it altogether. On the one hand, music abstracts and universalizes the contingent forms of one’s social and personal alliances by seeming to reach a place beyond all contingencies; on the other hand, music falls into contingency and strands one there, alienating both itself and the listener.25

25. Kramer, Musical Meaning, 6–­7.

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Aesthetic Denseness and Genre Ambiguity in Paris 1969 I now want to turn to a series of case studies, all taken from improvised performances that took place in Paris during the summer of 1969. Collectively these performances demonstrate the ontological ramifications of genre ambiguity and aesthetic denseness, and how aesthetic thickening can have powerful political instrumentality. Precisely as Joe Cocker crooned “I get by with a little help from my friends” on the soon-­to-­be-­destroyed field of Max Yasgur in Bethal, NY, during the Woodstock Festival, a cadre of African American jazz musicians assembled in Paris to record over fifty albums in approximately six weeks. The seminal group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was formed during this period in Paris. Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Sunny Murray (by then living in Paris), Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee (the list goes on)—­all recorded together in Paris that summer, along with musicians more identified with earlier jazz styles such as Clifford Jordan and Philly Jo Jones. Also involved were members of the France-­based jazz avant-­garde, such as Jacques Coursil and Claude Delcloo. A number of these players had just attended the first Pan-­African Jazz Festival in Algiers, where players such as Shepp performed, often for the first time, with African-­based musicians. This event gave added momentum to the Black Arts Movement’s pan-­African philosophy and, via the continued musical explorations by those such as Don Cherry, ultimately helped give rise to the “world music” phenomena.26 Paris had long been a preferred destination for African American jazz musicians who found its cosmopolitanism and relative openness to Afrological forms of artistic expression refreshing, welcoming, and often at odds with the situation at home. Freed from the immediate shackles of Jim Crow and the varied limitations and expectations foisted on them by American policies, attitudes, and prejudices, they were relatively free to pursue their artistic projects and, crucially, to take control of and reconstruct their identities. A vibrant African American musical subculture had long existed in Paris, and many jazz artists found Paris to be sympathetic place for the presentations of “selves” that may not have been well received at home.27 Recording intensely every day in different combinations, from the drum solos of Andrew Cyrille, the assorted ensembles lead by Sunny 26.  A full history of this period has yet to be written. For an insightful, if partial, history see Chapter Seven of Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself, and Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution (Chapter Three). 27. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself.

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Murray, and the extended compositions of Alan Silva, symphonic both in number of musicians and length, these musicians not only gave rise to new kinds of group improvisation but were engaged in the clear articulation of a social and political agenda that involved, but was not limited to, acts of identity and memory construction that could serve to counterbalance the identities and memories foisted on them by the predominately white ruling class. Much of the community they formed was based on the articulation of a shared musical history and a precise manner of viewing their musical experimentalism as a continuation of a history of avant-­garde black music-­making. It was this history, that of African diasporic music-­ making, that they were reclaiming via their musical performances. Yet, as we shall see, creating a community based on, among other things, a shared musical history and so a particular perspective on the cultural, social, and political function of music has ethical ramifications. The French authorities, sensing the potential political subversiveness of this music and fearing a reprisal of the student-­led violence of the previous summer, did not allow a planned public festival to take place in France. The music created is, luckily, preserved, issued officially predominantly on the French label Actuel, which has come to have almost legendary status.28 I want to first focus upon four recordings under the nominal leadership of Archie Shepp, the standard “Sophisticated Lady,” “My Angel,” “Blasé,” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” all issued on the Shepp album entitled Blasé and all sung by vocalist Jeanne Lee.29 When Jeanne Lee died of cancer in 2000 at the age of sixty-­one, she left behind a legacy of music as wonderful as it is obscure. There exists no complete discography of her music; much of it was issued (when issued at all!) on very small private labels, now long defunct.30 It suffices to say that she is clearly one of the most important innovators in creative music of the past forty-­five-­odd years, and her influence on avant-­garde vocalists is both deep and wide.31 In particular, I will focus on Lee’s critique of improvisation as a potentially powerful community-­building and representation-­altering practice, 28. It and ESP are the two small independent labels most closely associated with the mid-­to late-­1960s “new thing” in jazz, and both are also surrounded by a miasma of myth, intrigue, and controversy. 29.  Archie Shepp, Blasé, Live at the Pan-­African Festival, Actuel 2, 1969. 30.  Many on BIRTH, the label owned by her husband of many years and fellow musician, Gunter Hampel. 31.  For a discussion of her early acts of identity construction via the singing of jazz standards see E. Lewis, “This Ain’t a Hate Thing.”

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given the concrete reality of black women at the time in the community of avant-­garde improvisers. I want to try to situate Lee’s performances within a precise history, and what will emerge is yet another way in which Lee’s performances are simultaneously musically and politically progressive, for with these performances Lee constructs a statement of second-­wave African American feminism predating what are seen as this movement’s founding texts by some years, a critique that functions both discursively and musically. Lee’s performances emerge as constituting a critical examination of improvisation’s potential as a tool for empowerment, yet with a recognition of improvisation’s ability to both question, and perpetuate, the status quo. The complexity of improvisational music’s involvement with both liberatory and oppressive social practices is paralleled by the complexity of issues internal to the African American community concerning the relations between the struggles for racial and sexual equality and the ability, or usefulness, of distinguishing the two. What takes place in these performances is a complex series of acts, involving on the one hand the creation of a community based on a particular view of their collective musical history enacted via genre multiplication. Yet at the same time Ms. Lee, recognizing that such a constructed community places moral demands on its members toward each other, enacts a countervailing critique of the wider community of African Americans that they are all members of from the perspective of gender equality. All this is conducted in the context of highly improvised musical performances, which are for that very reason ideally suited for the construction of communal identities. Yet these improvised performances need to be taken as performances of certain songs, and as embedded in certain genre histories, for these critiques to be effective. In this way, ontological issues are closely intertwined, as we will see, with genre considerations and with the ethical component of music. There is a growing consensus among scholars of the improvised musics that have emerged from the African American community that improvisation is a potent site for the development of new forms of dialogue, and potentially status-­quo-­disrupting models of deliberation and community-­ building.32 Yet the sometimes-­utopian claims made on behalf of improvisation have been challenged by (among others) feminist theorists of improvisation, who question whether all models of improvisation avoid the many ways in which patriarchal practices, methods, and concepts infect the arts. They have also interrogated the history of jazz to see if the egalitarianism 32.  See, for example, the papers collected in Fischlin and Heble’s The Other Side of Nowhere.

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implicit in improvising has transcended deeply engrained sexist practices (often it has not), and to what degree the promised political dialogue that is one of improvisation’s potentially revolutionary functions has turned its attention toward gender inequalities and attempts to eradicate them. For the truth is (as has been best revealed by feminist historians of jazz such as Sherri Tucker) that the status of women in jazz, and the lens cast on them by those viewing jazz, has generally been abysmal.33 The fact that group improvisation involving both male and female participants is in principle a site for the thickening of moral relations between the participants, but as a matter of fact often serves to re-­inscribe existing inequalities, would be merely ironic were it not actually harmful. It is with the (so-­called) radical black jazz avant-­garde, associated with the Black Arts Movement, and organizations such as the AACM, that the political/dialogical nature of improvisation is most clearly articulated and theorized. A large, and still understudied, subject is how issues of gender inequality within the community of African American avant-­garde improvisers are addressed via their improvising practices.34 Lee’s performances on Blasé do just this, and so we need to see just how these performances comprise an early critique of existing gender relations within the African American community, and how they can be seen as the beginning of a dialogue on these issues—­how musically they manifest a number of features that need to be part of any successful attempt to address gender inequality within this community. We also need to see how this is accomplished partially via collective acts of genre multiplication, and the ontological ramifications of such acts.35 What will emerge is a way to see Lee’s performances on Blasé as a sophisticated recognition of both the utopic and dystopic potentials of improvisation, of its ability to help effect representation modifications, yet also its potential to reproduce existing injustices, or to address them merely sonically, without having such critiques carry over into political practice. Lee simultaneously presents us with the transformative power of improvisation and gives us a lesson in its limitations and often mere appearance of politi33.  See Tucker, Swing Shift, and Tucker and Rustin, Big Ears. 34.  For a pioneering study of this see by Valerie Wilmer, “Women’s Role,” Chapter Four in As Serious as Your Life. 35.  The cooperation Lee received from her male coimprovisers in effecting her critique did not carry over to the community of male music critics, who have erased this performance from the history of this period, quite literally.

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cal efficacy.36 The moral imperative that accompanies coming to share in a community of memory with others is not always acted on, even when recognized. Lee’s performances point to precisely this problem, as she will, in effect, chide her fellow (male) improvisers for their unwillingness to treat her as a equal in the social community at large, while they do treat her as a musical equal. The point is that the moral obligations they have to each other insofar as their group improvisations construct a communal history of their collective practices are not, and should not, be left behind on the bandstand, for a shared history, musical or otherwise, is a crucial part of the narrative that binds any “people” together. On August 16, 1969, Lee recorded with seven other musicians, all male, under a session nominally led by saxophonist Archie Shepp. Lee’s vocal performances on Blasé constitute four of the five tracks, with each concerning, as well as exemplifying, the (re-­)representation of African American women via a performance drawn from a distinct musical genre, all of which are closely identified with African American musical production. Lee addresses issues of signal importance to the then-­still-­nascent theorizing of second-­ wave African American feminism, issues that were very much alive in the community of African American avant-­garde musicians. Her comments on gender politics within the African American community as found in these performances range from the most subtle to the most devastatingly direct. Collectively they form perhaps an unprecedented critique, with respect to its range of targets, its sensitivity to the variety of oppressions African American women in general and artists in particular faced, and its recognition of the ambivalent position improvisational musical practices occupy with respect to the politics at play, being both a model of possible redemptive and egalitarian practices, yet equally the site of the acting-­out of gender oppression by male artists. Improvisation, as we shall see, is both balm and poison, giving us glimpses of both utopic and distopic visions.37 Musically, Lee’s performances are examples of four distinct ways of presenting, and questioning, representations. Crucially, these performances work as a group. The assorted ways they throw into question existing repre36.  Of course improvisation can also totally fail to model an egalitarian community; consider examples where he who plays loudest is heard, and controls the improvisation. 37.  This is one important way in which Lee differs from her most obvious predecessor, Abbey Lincoln, particularly the Lincoln performance of the “Freedom Now Suite” (Roach, We Insist!). In addition, Lincoln’s contribution to this important work was in many ways imposed on her by her male bandmates. See Monson, Freedom Sounds, for a discussion of the “Freedom Now Suite.” Lincoln’s influence on Lee will be discussed further below.

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sentations of African American women and reconfigure them are a cumulative process, each supporting the other, with the political message of one performance, “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” only emerging as the result of the other three. The manners in which Lee’s musical reconfigurations effect representational reconfigurations are four, what I call single semantic substitution (“Sophisticated Lady”), genre inversion (“My Angel”), direct confrontation (“Blasé”), and hidden commentary (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”), a form of deep signifying itself a characteristic literary trope of African diasporic texts.38 These four semantically distinct ways of re-­representing black female identity also map on to signal characteristics of the four musical genres these performances most naturally code as. “Sophisticated Lady” is an elegant song in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, a tradition whose lyrical and musical style tends to avoid politically charged and dangerous subjects, and comments on social/cultural issues obliquely and gently, if at all. Here, as we shall see, Lee’s alteration of one word effects the meaning alteration, a subtle change to a tune in a style known for its oblique referencing of weighty issues. “My Angel” is a blues,39 and here Lee inverts the meaning of a standard blues form. This too is characteristic of the blues genre, where inverted meanings, double-­voiced texts, and expressive inversion are common. “Blasé” occupies a sonic space squarely centered in the Black Arts Movement’s aesthetic, which is known for direct and confrontational modes of addressing social issues. This is just how Lee addresses them here. “There is a Balm in Gilead” is a traditional gospel tune closely identified with the black church. Insofar as Lee’s performance here relies on hidden commentary for its political effectiveness, it is drawing on a feature characteristic of gospel tunes in general (the fact that many are in effect commentaries on biblical texts, texts that themselves need interpretation to draw out their social/ethical components), and the often-­secret messages coded in early black spirituals, a tradition that was banned by many slave owners.40 38.  Each of these methods bears affinities to the typology of signifyin(g) methods discussed in Gates, The Signifying Monkey. 39.  See below for a discussion of in what sense “My Angel” codes as a blues. 40.  Certain facts about this recording session are very difficult to establish. Only two of the performers are still alive, and I have found both to be rather difficult to pin down concerning this session. Much time has passed, and as shall become apparent, the rather obvious critical stance taken by Lee and directed at her coimprovisers has contributed, I think, to an unwillingness of those involved to speak out. All the compositions are attributed to Shepp, with the exception of the Mills/Ellington composition, by then a standard, “Sophisticated

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Let us turn to the recordings. As mentioned, the one standard performed at this session is “Sophisticated Lady.”41 It may very well have been a choice by Shepp, in keeping with his tendency at the time to integrate standards into his recording sessions, perhaps as an attempt to foreground the continuity of the black avant-­garde with its own history, and to display the breath and variety of African American musical practices. As the lyrics show, this song, written by men,42 is an attempt to present the emotional pain and weakness of a woman who lost an early love, and now masks her pain via living an essentially empty life, hiding behind the sophisticated trappings of an elegant lifestyle. Once the fool, she is now fragile, one who cries when no one is looking. The song ends with the following line: “. . . you miss the love you lost long ago / And when nobody is nigh you cry.” Or at least she ends up crying in every version of this song I have been able to find prior to Lee’s rendition. Lee, in the final verse, changes the “And when nobody is nigh you cry” to “And when nobody is nigh you sigh.” This seemingly minor revision takes on greater importance than one might think in light of the other performances during this recording. Lee’s sophisticated lady will not leave the song crying; she sighs, perhaps out of resignation, or perhaps she is at peace with her situation. But those who sigh are in more control than those who cry. And perhaps now the line that says “the years have changed you” can be seen as self-­reflexive. For now, the reaction of women to situations such as these is changed, no powerless tears anymore, as in the first singing of the verse, but one sighs on deciding to act, realizing that one wants more than the status quo and will no longer accept it. By changing the representation of the sophisticated lady from a crier to a sigher, Lee is preparing the ground for the more radical re-­representations she will effect in her other performances that day. It is as if the time to cry is over, the time to act is now. Here she slips the alteration in by changing but one word of a preexisting text, even keeping the rhyming pattern intact.43 Lady.” It was standard practice to attribute compositions to the band leader, yet this doesn’t necessarily represent the actual facts of the matter. Accordingly, some of what I will argue for is guesswork, yet informed by familiarity with practices at the time and other precedents. 41. To hear: https://open.spotify.com/track/3py1tX1zRo9DyHlXmyXOcn?si=DErV5eR yTQGfiLrrBcJFZw 42.  The words are by Mitchell Parish (published by Irving Mills), while the music is by Duke Ellington. 43.  As we shall see, Abbey Lincoln asks, “to whom will she cry rape?” Lee’s move from “cry” to “sigh” to action/anger models the historical dialectic within the African American feminist community’s discourse and action directed toward its own oppression.

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Musically, apart from a Cecil Taylor-­esque piano introduction by Dave Burrell featuring a burst of dense tone clusters, the band plays the tune rather “straight,” departing from the melody and harmony in a manner characteristic of then-­mainstream jazz practices, producing a version of “Sophisticated Lady” easily identifiable as such to anyone familiar with the song. After his introduction, Burrell sticks closely to the song’s written chord changes, as does Lee’s performance, slipping in its semiotic rupture in a manner that may easily have passed unnoticed by her fellow performers. Let us now turn to “My Angel,” a brilliant commentary on an issue central to African American feminism that was being actively debated within the black avant-­garde community at the time, that of the role of African American women in the economic support of their activist partners.44 To generalize a complex social phenomena, to be discussed in further detail below, many African American feminists at this time saw their function in the advancement of civil rights, particularly with respect to economic rights, as primarily a supportive one. Many black women with activist male partners shouldered a disproportionate part of the communal income-­earning compared to their partners. This was particularly true of the partners of avant-­garde jazz musicians, who for the most part earned very little money from their art activism. As Valerie Wilmer documents in Chapter Four of her book As Serious as Your Life, entitled “Women’s Role,” the male community of improvisers was slow to recognize the essential function their female partners served in allowing them the economic freedom, however marginal, to pursue their craft. Adding the fact that the men rarely if ever allowed the women to be equal participants in their art activism enables one to see how the women were the invisible financial force that allowed male-­dominated African American art activism to flourish. Women who either wanted to participate in the music or at a minimum wanted recognition of their essential role as providers or assistance in discharging this function, were often ostracized, belittled, or cast aside. It is with this background that Lee signifies subtly and effectively on this situation by totally turning inside-­out a traditional blues narrative of one’s man going away perhaps never to return, morphing it into another kind of blues, the “my man done me wrong” narrative.45 This genre inversion simultaneously questions the status quo concerning this song type and 44.  To hear: https://open.spotify.com/track/2FLOzyQvmKoDBnVAcNp98M?si=YZHW xHGNQeq-HZzrdgEw4Q 45.  See Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism for a pioneering analysis of blues tropes and women.

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the social/political reality it represents. The narrative behind the common “missing man” blues trope is the need for the man to go elsewhere, perhaps north, to find economic possibilities. The hoped-­for resolution of this journey away, “with a sack upon his back,” is a return with money to the familial homestead. What Lee does to this trope is nothing short of genius; with the subtlest changes it comes to reflect an aspect of the present reality as faced by avant-­garde women within the black activist community while remaining true to one of the blues genre’s standard narratives, just not the expected one given in the opening lines of the song. With “Sophisticated Lady” Lee modified the meaning of the song while keeping the song style intact. With “My Angel” she totally transforms the expected semiotic force of the song with an equally minimal modification. A love-­soaked “missing man” blues suddenly becomes its opposite, leaving you questioning the genre’s boundaries and the meaning such a blues suggests. The first verse is a standard “missing man” blues text—­her angel, her man, is going away with a sack on his back, and will not come back. He is gone, gone, gone. Here we are led into thinking that what we have is a blues bemoaning lost love due to financial hardship (itself the product of racist social practices), the need for one’s man to travel far to support the family, and the pain such absences produce. Yet soon this blues is interrupted with what I am certain is Lee’s on-­the-­spot improvisation of “give him money.” This is musically jarring, but at first, seems to fit the traditional theme—­the anonymous “you” should give him money, should employ him, perhaps. But, crucially, in the very middle of her extended riffing on the “give him money” motif, Lee changes it to “gave him my money.” It becomes clear that he has left with her money in the sack on his back, and he is not coming back since what at first seems to be a journey for opportunity is actually the fleeing of a thief. Her angel is no angel at all; on being given everything by her, he leaves. Now the phrase “my angel” is double-­voiced: it seems to be clearly ironic, but might also hold on to the meaning it appears to have at the beginning of the song; she may still love the rogue while recognizing that he is a thief. This is just what African American women in the musical avant-­ garde were often starting to consciously accuse their partners of. One cannot but assume that this subtle, yet total, rearrangement of the expected blues narrative was an improvisatory decision, and one that her coimprovisers may not even have noticed as it was happening.46 Against the backdrop of avant-­ 46.  Even if the song was actually written by Archie Shepp, Lee’s modification of the lyric

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garde black male musicians living off their female partners’ earnings, yet often abandoning them, and the strong pressure black women felt to support black men in their struggles toward political and economic autonomy, the two-­voiced meaning of “My Angel” seems to reflect this reality perfectly. Against this backdrop the last verse takes on a double-­voicedness of both description and command with opposed meanings: Gone with a sack upon his back, He ain’t never coming back, Never, never, no, no never Give him money, give him money . . . Musically the performance begins with two harmonicas playing a bluesy introduction, each, however, in a different key. Shepp enters in yet a third discordant key, and the piano begins an ostinato, basically unaltered, throughout the song. While the music, in common time, has the feel of a blues, it is certainly not in traditional blues form and lacks any harmonic movement. These musical inventions subvert the blues form just as Lee’s lyrical improvisations subvert the expected blues narratives. Again, one can only wonder if the male musicians noted the discursive signifying Lee engaged in by adding the “my money” into the lyric. While the vocal contortions and improvisations she employs—­high-­pitched drones, modernist scat, and so on—­are very much in keeping with the aesthetic of her male improvisers (yet are her invention), it is her discursive alteration that does more to subvert the blues form being signified on than does the musical interventions on their own. Much of the power of this reconfiguration of the song narrative, and its commentary on contemporary politics within the community of African American improvisers, requires one to hear the song as a blues, as this genre identification partially underlies the semantic inversion at play. You need to know the common blues narrative tropes in order to have your expectations confused and then reconfigured. It is with the title track of this session, the song “Blasé,” that issues of representation and sexual politics are addressed head on.47 to “gave him my money” would be a powerful undermining of the more traditional trope the original lyric implied, and would be a forceful act of signifyin’ on Lee’s part. 47.  To hear: https://open.spotify.com/track/6PwAO8CGswR3HI3ZSpg0R9?si=ioMmBp lzTq6wFfof7PFgUA

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“Blasé” Blasé Ain’t you daddy. You Who shot your sperm into me But never set me free. This ain’t a hate thing It’s a love thing. If lovers every really love that way The way they Say. I gave you a loaf of sugar48 You tilt my womb till it runs. All of Ethiopia awaits you My prodigal son. Blasé ain’t you big daddy But momma loves you. Sheeeeeeeee Allllwaaaays has. (repeated, with slight variations) Jeanne Lee’s recitation is a powerful and direct critique of gender politics within the African American community, explicitly with respect to the pan-­ Africanist aspects of much radical African American political theorizing of the period. As we shall see shortly, it is a very early statement of second-­wave African American feminism, brutal in its critique of what Lee sees as black radicalism and the back-­to-­Africa movement’s ignoring of African American women in its quest for liberation. It predates, for example, the original manifesto of the Combahee River Collective by a good five years, and so 48.  This phase has assorted affinities with “My Angel” and the claim that she gave her man both money and everything. A sugar momma is a woman who takes care of her man financially, and a sugar loaf is one expression for money (along with its sexual overtones representing a woman’s womb). Yet to call someone a sugar loaf is an expression opposed to a sugar momma, and so this line takes on a number of opposed meanings.

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as a pure text is, I think, an important political document.49 Research that still needs to be done is to relate this text to other feminist texts by African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement such as Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez, among others. I will have something to say about this shortly. As theorists such as Jacque Attali have argued concerning improvised jazz in general, we may here have another example of improvisatory arts pre-­articulating political agendas only later made more discursively explicit. The relation—­historical, conceptual, and otherwise—­of “Blasé” to contemporaneous developments in African American feminism is interesting, vexing, and difficult to pin down. On the face of it, “Blasé” is a very early statement of what is often considered to be second-­wave black feminism. Yet we need to be very careful here. As scholarship of the last ten to fifteen years has shown, the historiography of black feminist action and theory is complex and has often been ignored or occluded by the dominant white feminist narratives. The terms “first wave,” “second wave,” and so on, while perhaps serving a useful pedagogic function, carry along with them the standard problems of such rigid categories, and particular ones of their own (not the least being that these categories were constructed to help make sense of stages of white feminist thought). With respect to black feminist thought and action we need to constantly be aware of the many ways in which feminist causes are intertwined with civil rights theorizing and action, and the constellation of ways in which the legacy of slavery and the reality of Jim Crow (during the period under consideration) inflect not just the content of black feminism itself, but our ability to access it at all. For example, when considering any particular historical span, the absence of large-­scale organizations or of easily available and popularly disseminated texts explicitly related to black feminism need not entail the absence of black feminist action and thought during this period. Much of the emerging history of black feminism needs to rely on personal narratives, both as witness to the history itself and often as the primary locus of political action. Within the realm of this murky historiography we need to realize, as 49. To help historically situate this performance, the following are the dates of some important events in black feminist and arts organizing: 1973, founding of the National Black Feminist Organization; 1974, founding of the Combahee River Collective; 1977, initial publication of Azalea, a literary magazine for Third World lesbians; 1978, initial concert tour of “Varied Voices of Black Women.”

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Ingrid Monson has recently argued,50 that much African American radical political action, be it directed at civil rights or advancing feminist goals (and the two are closely intertwined), is strongly situationist. By this I mean that the activist alliances that any individual or organization is committed to, while perhaps in broad strokes most sympathetic to a particular “ideology” of feminist or civil-­rights theorizing, often were strongly contextual and might alter as circumstances altered. African American feminists who theorized the interrelations and overdetermination of race, gender, and class-­ based oppressions were often willing to advance perhaps even somewhat contradictory agendas (from a theoretical perspective) if they might improve conditions in the here and now. The terror and oppression of Jim Crow placed African American women in a difficult position with respect to attempts to address the many hardships they faced.51 To raise issues of gender inequality within the African American community itself was to risk the appearance, and reality, of placing additional roadblocks in the way of advancing civil rights. To raise ostensibly feminist issues (which coded as white) was often seen by black male activists and others as part of a white attempt to divide black solidarity at a time when it was most needed to help advance civil rights. This was made all the more difficult for black feminists by the fact that many of the leaders of the civil rights movement, and in particular those associated with black nationalist movements, at times articulated blatantly sexist rhetoric. In the context of Jeanne Lee’s activism and art, two figures who loomed large, Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), both professed at various times in their careers essentialist theories about the nature of (black) women and their role, both within ongoing revolutionary actions and in an “ideal” society, that were far from egalitarian and were often blatantly demeaning and oppressive.52 How was this fact received by women in the Black Arts Movement, and 50. Monson, Freedom Sounds. 51.  And of course, continue to face. I write this a week after the election of D. Trump, and these issues are as real as they have ever been. 52.  Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins coined the term “outsider-­within” to characterize the status of black women both within the civil rights movement (where their outside status was due to the movement’s dominant masculinity) and within the feminist movement (where their outside status was due to the movement’s dominate whiteness). Yet this dual outsider status, and the double oppression that it produced, also made clear the need to develop a distinctive black feminist movement. See, for example, Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within.”

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how in particular does Jeanne Lee’s performance of “Blasé” relate to this history of response? Let us first consider some important dates in the history of African American feminism. President Kennedy’s 1963 Commission on the Status of Women and related report (“Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women”) is often cited as the first obviously public and official document to recognize the differential status of black women in America.53 This commission had a subcommittee of black women that issued its own report on the status of black women. Unfortunately, that report was neither acted on nor even cited in the official summary of the committee’s activities. The same year as this “officially sanctioned” black feminist group met, a number of poor black women based in the Watts section of L.A. formed Aid to Needy Children (ANC) Mothers Anonymous. However, this group, for all its interest and importance, was to go on to have far closer ties with welfare-­rights groups than with feminist groups per se. The years 1968–­ 69 are usually cited as the beginnings of black feminist organizing. Indeed, the title of Kimberly Springer’s 2005 book, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–­1980, is indicative of the temporal beginnings of such organizing, although historians have rightly looked to the nineteenth century for such precedents as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Maria Therese Metoyer (“Coin Coin,” whose activist life has been, and continues to be, explored and presented artistically by Matana Roberts) being but three examples.54 In 1968 the Third World Women’s alliance was founded, emerging as the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC), itself an outgrowth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an important group in the civil rights movement. In 1969 the BWLC split from the SNCC (itself in decline) and became the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA). The BWA had three stated goals, each worth considering with respect to Jeanne Lee’s performances. The first was to dispel the myth of black matriarchy, a version of which had it that freedom had been a privilege all along of white men and black women. This myth could also be used to argue for a more patriarchal structure within black communities, for one could claim that the history of black matriarchy was precisely what needed to be overthrown to gain racial equality. Related to this goal was the desire to reconsider the history of the status of women during slavery, to overturn the often-­made claim that black women were far better off than black men 53.  Of course, voices within the African American feminist community, as far back as perhaps Sojourner Truth’s rightly famous 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” if not earlier, recognized and theorized about this differential status. 54. Springer, Living for the Revolution.

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under slavery. The objective was to demonstrate instead both that women were also slaves because of, and with respect to, their sex, and that women tended to share equally with men the oppressive work that slaves were forced to undertake. Third, and crucial for our analysis of Lee—­and here the trope of “second wave” becomes most prominent—­the BWA undertook a redefinition of the role of black women in the black-­led revolutionary struggle primarily by responding to the sexism of much black nationalist rhetoric. According to the important African American activist Francis Beal, as reported by Springer, “Now we noticed another thing. And that is, with the rise of nationalism and the rejection of white middle class norms and values, that this rejection of whiteness . . . took a different turn when it came to the Black women. That is, Black men began defining the role of Black women in the movement. They stated our role was a supportive one, others stated that we must become breeders and provide an army: still others stated that we had Kotex or pussy power.”55 Indeed, many black men were strongly against the birth control pill, viewing it as a white-­developed eugenic tool to prevent the creation of future black revolutionaries. It is against this backdrop that we need to interrogate Lee’s opening claim: “Blasé ain’t you big daddy / you who shot your sperm into me / but never set me free.” The prominence of sexist rhetoric in black nationalist discourse is aptly stated by Pauli Murray (as reported by Duchess Harris), another leading black feminist activist at the time. She tells us that “before and during this time, many black women felt frustrated by the treatment they received from black men involved in the black power movement. Black women began to sense that the struggle into which they had poured their energies, black liberation and the civil rights movement, may not afford them rights they assumed would be theirs when the civil rights cause triumphed.”56 Even a consideration of the history as condensed as that just presented makes it clear that Lee’s “Blasé” is a very early articulation of the emerging disquietude black feminists were feeling about the sexism intrinsic to, and part of the public rhetoric of, black nationalism. I certainly have been unable to find an earlier statement as explicit as this, with an exception to be discussed shortly. But first I want to briefly consider the response of women associated with the Black Arts Movement to Malcolm X in particular, since this has been discussed by the scholar of both jazz and black feminist theory, Farah Jasmine Griffin, in an important article, “Ironies of the Saint, Mal55. Springer, Living for the Revolution, 48. 56.  Houck and Dixon, “Pauli Murray,” 232.

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colm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection.”57 And of course it is natural to consider Lee against the context of the women associated with the Black Arts Movement. Griffin demonstrates that the appeal of Malcolm X to black women, primarily due to his “courage and commitment to black liberation,” was also due to his call for the protection of black women. The often paternalistic ramifications of this call, coupled with its assumption of the lack of black female agency or an actual attempt to strip them of what agency they did manifest, can be partially explained by the daily threat of violence that many black women faced. Griffin shows how this “promise of protection” has a long, rich history in African American writing and political action. What Griffin also is clear about is the “very problematic gender politics” behind this promise. It is against this backdrop of black women artists, often poets, praising Malcolm X in ways that “celebrate the very patriarchy of his masculinity and held that up as his value to us as a people”58 that we need to consider Lee, and now also Abbey Lincoln’s 1966 essay, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” published in Negro Digest.59 Abbey Lincoln was one of the most important jazz singers of the postwar period. She also participated in a number of events, recordings, and performances central to jazz’s role in advancing civil rights and the growing radical turn that much of this action took in the early to mid sixties. Most famously, she participated in the seminal We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, under the leadership of her then husband Max Roach.60 Crucially for our purposes, Lincoln was a major influence on Lee, who states, “I love that woman [Lincoln]! She is a shining light. . . . I feel like Abbey is my big sister. . . . I realized that until I could do with what I had what she was doing with what she had, that I wasn’t a singer yet, you know. And ever since then it’s been, like, this woman made it possible for me to have faith in the fact that I am a poet, and I did not have to sing standards in order to be a Jazz singer.”61 Griffin sees Lincoln’s essay “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” as exemplifying the “promise of protection” philosophy that she describes, claiming that here we find “Abbey Lincoln’s call for a Malcolm-­like black 57.  Farah Jasmine Griffin, “‘Ironies of the Saint.’” 58.  Griffin, “‘Ironies of the Saint,’” 224. 59.  Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 60.  We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, Max Roach, Candid Records CJM 8002, 1960. 61.  Lewis, “Interview,” 12.

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man who will revere and protect us in the traditional sense of these words.”62 I want to suggest that an alternative reading of Lincoln’s piece can be seen as a creative precursor to Lee’s “Blasé,” given Lincoln’s obvious influence on Lee, both as a singer and activist. After pointed criticism of white attitudes toward blacks in general, and black women in particular, Lincoln turns to a critique of the attitude of black men toward black women: “But strange as it is, I’ve heard it echoed by too many Black full-­grown males that Black womanhood is the downfall of the Black man in that she (the Black woman) is ‘evil,’ ‘hard to get along with,’ ‘domineering,’ ‘suspicious,’ and ‘narrow minded.’ In short, a black, ugly, evil you-­know-­what.”63 Lincoln goes on to present a litany of oppressions black women face, often from their own men, adding ironically that the black woman is then accused of being “the emasculator of the only thing she has ever cared for, her Black man.” Here we see the love/hate dichotomy of Lee’s “Blasé.” This line seems to be clearly reflected in the final line of Lee’s “Blasé” (and perhaps also found in “My Angel”), “but momma loves you, she always has.” Lincoln goes on to claim, “Maybe if our women get evil enough and angry enough, they’ll be moved to some action that will bring our men to their senses.”64 Lee’s “Blasé” is just such an action—­based in anger, but the anger directed at those one loves and cares for, it is a call for a reconfiguration of relations, not a rejection of them. Griffin reads the end of Lincoln’s piece as a plea for protection of black women by black men. This it may well be (although Lincoln’s suggestion that black women need to get “evil and angry” does not suggest this to me). But it can also, in light of what precedes the end, take on both an ironic cast (with respect to the claims about what aspects of black womanhood need protection) and a deeply ambivalent position with respect to where this protection should, and might, come from. The passage reads as follows: Who will revere the Black woman? Who will keep our neighborhoods safe for Black innocent womanhood? Black womanhood is outraged and humiliated. Black womanhood cries for dignity and restitution and salvation. Black womanhood wants and needs protection, and keeping, and holding. Who will assuage her indignation? Who will 62.  Griffin “‘Ironies of the Saint,’” 226. 63.  Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 18. 64.  Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 19.

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keep her precious and pure? Who will glorify and proclaim her beautiful image? To whom will she cry rape?65 Is Lincoln being ironic in describing black womanhood as innocent, precious, and pure in light of the history of oppression she has described? And is this a plea for black men to come to their protection, or is it perhaps a call for self-­determination on the part of black women, a call for self-­protection? Or, might it be a deeply nihilistic claim, that as things stand, there is no one positioned to offer such protection? Lee’s “Blasé” takes up the ambiguities, the double-­voicedness, of Lincoln’s essay. Both speak up against an oppressive sexual politics sometimes practiced by black men, yet equally recognize the love they have for their men and the possibility of a truly loving and egalitarian relationship. I want to suggest that the musical accompaniment to “Blasé” by Lee’s male coimprovisers is a sonic model of such a loving and egalitarian relationship. Yet both Lee and Lincoln recognize that much will have to change to bring this about, and both are not sanguine about the possibility of this happening soon or easily.66 Much of our ability to address these issues is hindered by the lack of historical record, the death of most of the people involved, the passage of time and its effect on memory, and the natural and inevitable way in which we all reconstruct our past in light of subsequent events. It is clear that Lee’s “Blasé” is very much in sympathy with the complex feelings and theories coming out of the African American feminist community at the time and should be seen as a particularly early and artistically effective and important example of what has become known as second-­wave black feminism. If we have trouble precisely pinning down the message, this is due as much to the subtle, complex, and from certain perspectives, conflicting set of concerns being addressed. The utopic and dystopic aspects of improvisation that the 65.  Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 20. 66.  This analysis of Lee raises a number of further questions. Why did this performance take place in Paris, why there and then? Is it related to the oft-­cited view of black activist artists that they found Paris far less racially oppressive than the States, and so they felt less fear about speaking out? Or was Lee perhaps irked by the sexual liberalism, normally involving white women, that male black performers often cited when discussing the pleasures of Paris? Alternatively, stressing the complexity of the sexual politics at issue here, might Lee have felt particularly comfortable, protected in that sense, among this particular group of male musicians, so that she was able to express her anger, not at her fellow musicians per se, but at other sectors of the male black community?

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song points toward reflect both the good and bad that Lee and other African American feminists saw within their own communities, and serve as both a mirror to reflect these and a possible site for addressing them. In “Blasé,” Lee immediately contrasts the willingness of radicalized African American men (the “prodigal sons” awaited in Ethiopia) to have sex with African American women with their unwillingness to allow them to participate fully in their liberation goals. She accuses their love of African American women of being duplicitous, and being a kind of hate. At the same time, she notes that African American women have stood, and continue to stand, in solidarity with African American men. She also stresses that black women supply their men with money, the loaf of sugar, yet receive in return only sex perhaps bereft of love. “Blasé” begins with a brooding minor-­key two-­chord piano ostinato and an interlocking bass line, with seemingly randomly placed staccato cymbal and triangle hits. Shepp enters at 00:33 with an extremely controlled and melodic haunting solo. He employs a series of long sustained cry-­like held tones. There is ample use of space between his phrases, which have a smoky, blues-­inflected feeling. At about 1:20 the drummer starts to hit the snare, or perhaps a tambourine placed on the snare, with oddly placed accents, jarring Shepp’s linear blues-­like solo. In response Shepp widens his vibrato but does not go all out and explode, as one might expect given his changing timbre and standard (for the time) performance practices. A hard wail at 2:45 resolves into a soft low note, again countering one’s expectations given his usual practices. There then follows a blues-­inflected passage with clear vocal mimicry in the sax. The drums here play out-­of-­time tom-­tom beats. Lee enters at 3:39. While the piano, drum, and bass lock in to a circular minor-­key riff, Lee speaks and sings the first two lines clearly and regularly, with a slight tone of anger in her voice. Her tone is far more declarative and recitative than on the other tracks, almost as if singing is not what the subject calls for. The rhythm section does not yet react to Lee’s vocals but foregrounds her words with a regular, if haunting, background with a strong two-­beat feel, suggesting the tolling of a plaintive bell. Lee employs a long caesura between “hate thing” and “love thing,” her voice rising and then falling after the pause, the anger associated with hate resolving. At the end of the first cycle through the poem, Lee’s voice ascends in pitch at the end of “All Ethiopia awaits you, my prodigal son,” making it sound like a question as much as a statement—­is “He” actually a prodigal son? At this point (5:15) Shepp re-­enters, playing melodically and carefully, shouting briefly behind the line “big daddy,” yet clearly reining in his response. Lee, while singing

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the “she” from “She always has,” extends the word into a long atonal wail, which Shepp mimics with the upper harmonics on his horn. The rhythm section at this point plays allargando, threatening to grind to a halt, and placing extreme tension on the rhythmic propulsion of the piece. At this moment (6:19), the harmonica enters in a different key. It is both unexpected and jarring, playing twisted slurred blues licks, southern country style, a reconfiguration of the standard harmonica solo in a love lost/love gained blues. Shepp enters again with contrasting delicate soft melodic lines. The drums then follow Shepp on a syncopated run, which again resolves back to quite thoughtful blues-­inflected playing. At 8:03 Lee re-­enters, this time lengthening out each syllable of “Blasé isn’t you big daddy.” Now Shepp responds a bit more forcefully, with rich overtones and then soft tonguing. Lee stretches out “The way they say” at 9:10, while Shepp, after a brief pause, doubles her tone, then raises its pitch, which in this context sounds like a pause of respect. Then at 9:11 the rhythm section for the first time drops the repeating riff and goes to playing in free time. Lee increases the intensity of her singing, now with a clearly defiant tone, and everyone but the bass drops out until her last word, at which point Shepp enters wailing, followed by the band re-­entering, but quickly resolving to a quiet final note. Overall the band seems concerned with mood-­setting. They remain respectful of Lee’s vocalizations throughout. Shepp only at times and briefly mimics Lee’s lines, and never pushes the music in a new direction, never competes with Lee for sonic space. When he does follow her tone and melody he makes minor variations, personalizing her contributions but sticking to “her subject.” His controlled pent-­up playing, always threatening to break out into free hard blowing but never doing so, coupled with Lee’s tonal variations and use of silence, gives the whole piece great overall tension. Never is there the hard-­blowing “freak-­out” that one might expect this piece to resolve into. The band lets Lee’s vocalizations dictate the mood, foregrounding her voice and words. The rhythmic and melodic feeling throughout is dirge-­like; Shepp’s playing is, overall, a blues-­inflected lament, the drum, bass, and piano creating a slow processional march, with an uncomfortable haunting quality supplied primarily by the piano’s oddly voiced chords and overall minor tonalities, the random snare/tambourine taps over the repeating bass riff. The single most jarring element in all this is the harmonica solo, out of key, which is perhaps the most dominant single voice other than Lee’s. The harmonica solo’s incongruity in this setting may play the role of indicating that traditional African American musical forms can no longer go

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unexamined, that the blues has grown from back porch paeans to lost love to self-­reflective examinations of gender politics. It plays the role of “noise” unsettling the whole piece, a role normally played by the jazz instruments, and, more generally, the role many accused avant-­garde jazz of playing more generally with respect to the jazz tradition. As with “My Angel,” this role reversal is in keeping with Lee’s signifying on the blues “love lost” trope, destabilizing it and so questioning its assumptions concerning gender, politics, and identity. The musical dialogue that takes place displays what would be a more egalitarian model of social/political discourse for the African American community. Lee is allowed to lead the conversation. Her voice is listened to, never drowned out; she is not simply allowed to speak but then ignored. Her thoughts are received, picked up, and responded to respectfully. The modifications of her lines by her fellow improvisers are not rejections of them, but rather build on them. The individual voices and identities of the other musicians are not occluded or denied, but neither do they drown out Lee’s identity. A group identity is formed that neither erases nor ignores its female member but configures itself around this group identity and valorizes it. Interestingly, “Blasé” is one of the most aesthetically successful recordings made that summer in Paris. It has obvious unity, a clear sense both of tension and forward movement, and an interesting use of variation. It is both highly expressive and virtuosic. It works musically as well as it does because it works socially. If “Blasé” should be seen as an exercise in group identity construction based on gender equality, we can ask how effective such a performance-­cum-­ construction is at healing wounds. If improvisation is, as Lee once stated, a “very fine microcosmic demonstration of democracy,” how effective is it at turning demonstration into practice? Does the community of memory formed by these performers yield the expected thickening of ethical relations? Lee may have idealistic beliefs concerning the possibility of a more egalitarian future (do not all those engaged in righting social wrongs?), but she is equally a pragmatist when it comes to judging the effectiveness of improvisation’s ability to effect social change. It may be a powerful tool for effecting such change, but the tool must be picked up and used. Lee gives us a most subtle hint of her opinion on these matters via the choice to follow this performance (if, as a matter of fact, it did follow) with the traditional African American spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead.”67 This tune, with its 67.  To hear: https://open.spotify.com/track/1nzVCTGAudQZrsvRjKKK0g?si=3WJkMA MmR5WyusHJZfUfYQ

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calm talk of healing and its tonally “correct” harmonies, suggests reconciliation after the indictment that “Blasé” can be seen as presenting. Many male listeners I have spoken to “read” the inclusion of this song in this manner. Lee’s voice is at its most traditionally “singerly,” while Lester Bowie’s trumpet accompaniment is both respectful and one of his most traditionally beautiful solos. Pushed further, one might see this performance as an unfortunate capitulation to the status quo—­Lee’s way of saying “there, there, don’t worry, it’s alright” to her male colleagues. It would be a traditional way of finding solace in a seemingly gender-­blind unified African American identity via a performance of an archetypically African American spiritual. I want to suggest that Lee, with the selection of this tune, is engaged, even here, in an act of deep signifying, one that again points toward gender inequalities within her community. The spiritual performed, which is a commentary on the Old Testament, is itself a “hidden commentary” on the recording session and the seeming message of healing that the words suggest. Again, the possibility of gleaning this meaning would be lost without knowledge that this song is, as a matter of fact, a spiritual, and of the fact that black spirituals were often multivoiced insofar as they contained coded messages to their community, often very specific in nature. “There Is a Balm in Gilead” is based on Jeremiah 8:22. The King James version (in keeping with almost every other version) reads as follows, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” (my emphasis). The health at issue is that of a daughter, or all daughters. And the existence of the balm is seen as insufficient in and of itself to bring this healing about. Either it has not been applied to the daughters or it is ineffective. If the choice of this spiritual is to help heal the men of the “hurt” of “Blasé,” at the same time it recognizes that the wounds of the women are going unhealed. And if it is a commentary on “Blasé” itself, it may indicate that the existence of balms is not enough, for they need to be applied properly. This could be a message to the men in her community that sympathetic listening and response to women in a musical context now needs to be extended more widely if the balm is to be effective. Improvisation per se is a means, not the end, toward bringing about social, ethical, and political improvement. This is an application of the signifying trope par excellence, where the superficial meaning and function (healing, reconciliation, unity) is opposed by a “second voice” that serves to question these very meanings and functions. Such multivoiced texts have long been seen as characteristic of African American literary style. bell hooks has written elegantly about multivocalism in the black arts community, and it may come as no surprise that she cites

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John Coltrane and Duke Ellington as the two black artists who first demonstrated to her that you could speak with more than one authentic voice.68 The performances on Blasé collectively can be seen as genre-­expanding exercises that produce a new, shared understanding among the improvisers of each of the genres expanded on. They collectively claim these genres as part of their musical history and offer their performances as contributing to the living nature of these genres. These performances are examples of the possibilities that the collective sees for how each of these genres can go. In this sense they can be explained via the modal model applied not (only) at the level of individual preexisting works (as with “Sophisticated Lady” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead”), but at the level of genres themselves (as with “My Angel”). By performing a standard, a blues, a spiritual, and an experimental piece, each genre having its own history and locus of aesthetic interest, the ensemble both problematizes and thickens the aesthetically relevant properties of each piece. Such aesthetic thickening via genre multiplication is what underlies the community they form with each other, and serves to thicken their moral relations to each other in a way similar to how it thickens the aesthetic properties with which their performances are imbued. Their shared understandings of the genres performed, the histories of them, and the relationship of their own performances to this history are crucial for bringing about both moral and aesthetic thickening. And these functions are discharged primarily by the improvisational elements of these performances. These improvisations have far more than “mere” sonic functions, having also social, political, and ethical functions due to their role in collective identity construction. Before returning to a further examination of the ontological ramifications of such aesthetic thickening, I want to turn to another example of how genre position and history can both yield aesthetic thickening and have ontological and political ramifications. This, too, is drawn from a performance in Paris during the summer of 1969. Again, we will see how performer understandings of genres of music, individual musical works, histories of music, and so on both contribute to acts of aesthetic thickening and enter into the establishment of what musical work and/or what genre of music is performed. The piece I want to consider is entitled “Silence,” a composition attributed to Wadada Leo Smith and released on a recording nominally led by 68.  hooks, ““When I Was a Young Soldier,’” 11.

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Anthony Braxton, including in addition to Smith and Braxton the violinist Leroy Jenkins. Curiously, the recording was not released as part of the Actuel series, but was picked up by Black Lion (in 1974) and then rereleased on Freedom Records.69 I suspect that the album did not play into the Actuel folks’ understanding of what new black creative music, as a genre(!), should sound like. They perhaps parsed this effort (as many did of Braxton-­led projects of this period) as an unfortunate foray into European “art music,” ethnic Cage perhaps. However “Silence” is not so far removed sonically from other works produced by Paris-­based musicians of the period, particularly other AACM artists such as Roscoe Mitchell and some Art Ensemble works. With “Silence” one hears long soundless passages punctuated by small instrumental “interventions,” brief blasts of reeds, brass passages, occasional string instruments, and other instruments difficult to identify. In his dense book, Notes (8 Pieces), Smith stresses the importance of autonomy in improvisation, which he sees as freeing the “sound rhythm” elements from the limitations of reactive improvisation and from traditional elements of meter, tempo, and rhythm.70 This stress on autonomy in improvisation suggests an emphasis on the autonomy of individuals more generally, something African Americans have historically been denied. By employing a variety of small instruments, each given equal footing, by refusing to employ a strong rhythmic pulse, and by employing long stretches of silence, Smith is rejecting standard white constructions of black identity, particularly essentialist constructions of black music. The autonomy the music itself manifests is a product of Smith’s and his fellow improvisers’ autonomy in deciding what to play (and, crucially, when not to play) and, in particular, their conscious decision not to delimit their choices by genre expectations, themselves created by assumptions concerning what they, as black musicians, should sonically produce and how their productions should be categorized. Smith himself seems to view his music in this way: I, a black man, a creative improviser, strive, through my improvisations and as an improviser to pay homage to the black, the blackness of my people, and that these creations themselves are for all, and the natural laws that are prevailing under these creations are relative as they are interpreted or perceived by beings of other peoples.

69.  Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith, Silence. 70. Smith, Notes (8 Pieces), n.p.

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And: Critics have applied narrow concepts to this improvisational music so that they could easily write about and define it and dictate what is the essence of black music—­creative music. The percussion, brasses, strings and any other beaten, plucked or wind blown instruments in improvisational music are equal—­they are all equal in the creation of music.71 Smith sees his music as black music, and as part of a tradition of black music that has been misconstructed by critics. He wishes to be able to construct his own history and future for his music—­to express his personal autonomy via the creation of autonomous music. His music is to be considered as part of the history of black music, and the construction of a historical narrative of such music is at the forefront of what he is trying to accomplish. These thoughts are not mere conjecture but were made explicit by Smith himself with respect to the piece “Silence” during an interview (with George Lewis and Ted Panken) on WCKR-­FM, New York, September 12, 1995, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the AACM: Well, we wanted to look at music that would give us a chance to express exactly who we were. And once you make that particular commitment, you have to find out how you’re going to do this. So we decided that we would write for instruments, and write for ensembles, we didn’t have to accept the history that was given to us before, and we didn’t even have to expect some kind of present history or future history. We were able to contemplate the real essence of creative music. We were able to come in with projects, for example, like “Silence” is a piece that has silence in it, and it came after John Cage’s “Silence,” but the philosophical connection of silence in this case was to materialize music within the space, and whatever was heard in the environment, whereas in the Cage piece there was absolutely no music in the space, and the gestures were the moments of the environment, you see. So creating a piece that seemed that it would look like and feel like a piece that came out of Cage’s tradition, in fact, we didn’t have that problem, because as I say, we are not bound by what came in the past or this particular ensemble’s history—­you know, like a classical ensemble 71. Smith, Notes (8 Pieces), n.p.

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has a history that’s specifically European. We didn’t have to worry about that.72 (my emphasis) Smith’s music is an expression of who he is, a self-­construction of his identity. He rejects a view of “Silence” as just “Cage on the cheap,” while denying that he was bound by others’ construction of black music’s history, or similar constructions of European art music. By freeing himself from a history that has denied black artists autonomy, that has created a history and identity forcibly for such artists, Smith’s music—­the silence Smith employs—­speaks. It speaks of a new identity, it tells a new history. Silence as employed by Cage was perhaps a “mere” formal musicological element. Silence as employed by society against blacks was, and still is, a powerful tool of oppression. Silence as employed by Smith is both a musical “tool” serving to undermine a false construction of black music (as being rhythm-­bound, pulse-­driven, etc.), and a highly creative use of the tools of oppression to express musical and personal autonomy. Smith is explicit in his goal of constructing a historical narrative for the ensemble’s music, and by referencing both Cage and the tradition(s) of black music, “Silence” is aesthetically thickened via genre multiplication, a multiplication that both problematizes our genre assumptions about black music and suggests a political agenda related to autonomy and freedom, both social and musical. Smith, Braxton, and Jenkins aesthetically thicken “Silence” by overtly referencing an (in)famous work in the “high art” experimental musical tradition, while at the same time having their performances and works grounded in the jazz tradition. Yet while Cage’s piece 4’ 33” is intended to be devoid of political message, “Silence” is redolent with it and serves to reconstitute a history of black musical experimentalism. I want now to consider a third recording from Paris in the summer of 1969 by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who performed under this name for the first time then. Their album, Message to Our Folks, is a clear exercise in genre multiplication with the resultant aesthetic thickening, and it serves a polemical purpose of stating the range of musical genres that should be taken to partially constitute what they called “Great Black Music.”73 The message to their folks is, I think, just this—­that they should lay claim to these genres and view contemporary black musical experimentalism as aesthetically and historically linked to these assorted genres. Again, this point can only be 72.  Panken, “George Lewis and Leo Smith.” 73.  Art Ensemble of Chicago, Message to Our Folks.

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effective if their performances are received as examples of the genres they are laying claim to, as this ontological claim is a necessary foundation to their message. While Jeanne Lee’s performances on Blasé produced, as a result of aesthetic thickness, a political/social message directed, in the first instance, at her fellow improvisers, Message to Our Folks directs its message, produced in the same way, to the greater community that consumes their music and produces similar musics. The album opens with the piece “Old Time Religion,” which is not a spiritual as much as a sermon.74 Over a repeating four-­note arco bass riff Joseph Jarman recites a sermon in what sounds like an archaic style, with vocal responses from the other band members. Soon, long horn tones start to interfere with the spoken sermon, along with a tambourine. The call and response continues, with multiple “amens” that resolve into a melodically sung line: “give me that old time religion . . .” The vocals throughout are spoken with odd timbres, perhaps partially engineered. The piece rises in intensity with a series of “woops” and half-­valve trumpet blasts. Then the horns play a melodic line in unison and the piece dissolves into a series of soft call-­and-­response lines, ending with a single long tone. Taken in isolation, and with no contextual information, it would be very hard to place this piece with respect to genre, time, or place. “What is it?” is the question I often get when playing this piece for listeners without supplying any prior information about it. Its reference to, and embeddedness within, African American sacred music is clear, but little else is. It is followed by “Dexterity,” a bebop standard written by Charlie Parker. Here the Art Ensemble breaks one of the founding rules of the AACM, which is to only play original music. And while their performance is full of small idiosyncrasies, it is played fairly straight, with Malachi Favors’s walking bass line serving as a backdrop for a series of solos. They clearly stick rather closely to the piece as scored, and the overall structure of their performance is of a standard jazz type. Next is “Rock Out,” with Malachi Favors moving to fretless electric bass and Joseph Jarman playing brief electric guitar riffs, all over a busy percussion track. The piece is repetitive, with little rhythmic variation and no harmonic movement (indeed, for quite a while, apart from the repeating bass riff no real harmonic or melodic material is present at all). At one point a 74.  The spoken line “all that was wicked” from the sermon-­section of “Old Time Religion” was sampled, and can be discerned twice, in Amon Tobin’s 1997 song “The Nasty” from his album Bricolage.

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horn enters playing a rhythm-­and-­blues-­style solo, but with little interest or real commitment. The piece then moves to a brief bridge, and then the horn engages in more forceful honking, evoking the tradition of Texas tenors. The piece lies somewhere between parody and the merely boring, as if they are saying that rock music has black musical forms as its source, but has denuded them of any musical interest. There follows a brief guitar-­driven section, with playing that would not be out of context in a punk piece, which resolves into a series of distorted tones accompanied by car horns, cymbal crashes, and vocal exclamations, at which point the piece ends (is rock just noise?). The final piece on the album, “A Brain for the Seine,” takes up the whole B-­side. It is far more abstract, small instruments abound, and the ensemble makes much use of space and silence. There are spoken interludes asking “Can I please have a drink of water?” as if one is begging an aloof French waiter, or perhaps a jail guard. The piece sits squarely within the precise tradition of experimentalism that the members of the Art Ensemble and other first-­generation AACM members developed. The piece sounds like the audio track of a performance piece, which in many senses it is (given the highly performative nature of live Art Ensemble concerts). It lacks any rhythmic propulsion, although it occasionally has an implied beat. Sections include accordion, seeming to evoke French street musicians, while other sections, with piano and reeds, remind one of modernist European art music before morphing into sonically unique ensemble playing. Carefully constructed trumpet and saxophone lines often emerge out of near silence, with a focus on tone color and timbres produced by the use of extended techniques. There is a great variety of percussion accompaniment (the Art Ensemble was known to travel with over 2,000 instruments in total!), from bells to assorted ideophones, gongs, horns, and cymbals, which collectively suggest both the jungle and the city along with many imaginary soundscapes. Near the end of the piece there is a brief melodic line played in unison that resolves into a series of cymbal taps. What are we to make of this collection of works—­a warped sermon, a modernized but respectful version of a bebop classic, a parody of a rock piece, followed by an extended piece of musical experimentalism? Taken collectively, this album is a clear exercise in aesthetic thickening via genre multiplication, and it presents a politically embedded argument for the particular genre multiplication that takes place. The Art Ensemble squarely places their music within a tradition of black music-­making, but a tradition that is far broader than many had been willing to consider. They therefore

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ask one to situate their music-­making in a complex of overlapping histories of musical production. By having what are commonly taken to be distinct musical genres enter into dialogue with each other, the stability of the genre positions from which we are likely to consider their works is undermined. One is forced into an act of self-­interrogation concerning the judgments one makes about each performance based on one’s genre positionality. Indeed, one is inclined to take a multigenre viewpoint for each work as a result of hearing the album in total. You end up considering how changes in genre perspective yield changes in what properties of each work might partially constitute understanding of that work, and which are aesthetically valuable. You are invited to consider similarities between distinct perspectives, and how surprising aesthetic interest may be found by judging a work from an “alien” perspective. All of this is effected, partially at least, by viewing each performance as part of a number of histories of musical production, each with its own set of representative works and distinct, if related, evaluative discourses. It is important to compare this sort of aesthetic thickening via genre multiplication with what is commonly taken to be a characteristic of postmodernist art, the use of pastiche, or cut and paste. While individual Art Ensemble performances and/or works may often reference numerous musical genres, in crucial ways the Art Ensemble employs pastiche such that their practice is not so much outside postmodernist art practice, but rather is a critique and corrective of postmodernism as usually conceived. For it is common to see the role of pastiche in postmodern art practices as a means to occlude both a work’s place in the history of a particular art practice and its aesthetic value. To see this, it is instructive to compare the Art Ensemble’s use of genre multiplicity with that employed by John Zorn, particularly during his Spillane period.75 Zorn performances at that time were characterized by extremely rapid genre changes, often following each other only seconds apart, with little if any musical continuity between the distinct sections. In short order, one might hear a snippet of jazz, a bit of spaghetti-­western music, a blast of noise, a rock riff, and much more. The effect of these rapid changes is to disturb the stability of any genre perspective from which to judge the work, and so subvert the work’s horizontal unity. One’s expectations are constantly thwarted, and so one is left with neither a history to relate the performance to (except perhaps that of other such quick-­cut performances) nor a stable 75.  For example, see, Zorn, Spillane.

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genre position from which to judge the work.76 This either yields a kind of aesthetic numbness resulting from an ongoing attempt to perceive the work aesthetically but never succeeding, or (as many would say postmodernity invites) an eventual refusal to attempt to form any aesthetic judgment at all. In this latter sense, pastiche-­driven works are thought to be antitheory and antihistory.77 By not obviously fitting in with any one history of art production, and by problematizing in the extreme our ability to form aesthetic judgments concerning the works at all, both history and theory seem to fall to the wayside.78 It is worth asking what is left and whether such erasures can actually be affected, but for now I will ask: Is this the effect of the Art Ensemble’s use of genre multiplicity?79 Does it erase history and result in an aesthetically thin work, intentionally or not? It should be apparent from the preceding that far from creating a work outside of history, the Art Ensemble embed their work in a complex and rich history, and that their genre multiplication yields aesthetically rich rather 76.  Part of our inability to form expectations is due to the fact each genre episode is very brief, a quick riff or melodic fragment, and so no extended horizontal form begins to emerge. There is, I think, a crucial difference between this sort of pastiche and the sort that many see the Art Ensemble of Chicago engaging in, where seemingly random noises, or musically passages from assorted genres, may interrupt each other, or simultaneously invite our attention. In these cases distinct genre perspectives are brought into dialogue with each other, they confront each other (or, perhaps, a given perspective is made light of by a comic sonic intrusion). Our aesthetic perspectives are questioned and challenged, not thwarted. 77.  It would be interesting to consider whether such pastiche-­driven works fit with the examples of Eurological improvisations that George Lewis discusses, where distancing the music from obvious genre history is itself a reflection on Western musical history and its political dimensions, or, rather, is a “third way,” where genres are sonically referenced, but the works as a whole fail to suggest viewing them from any particular musical historical perspective. 78.  It is often thought that such uses of pastiche and bricolage help ground artworks in the everyday, in the social and political sphere, and so are characteristic of postmodern art production. This may be so, but as Jacque Rancière (quoted in Bishop, Participation, 83) reminds us, there is a tension “between the logic of art that becomes life at the cost of abolishing itself as art, and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all.” Presumably examples of the former are bricolage pieces lacking the formal unity of early modernist constructions (Beuys vs. Picasso, say) and dada-­inspired happenings or encounters, while the latter would be avant-­garde art according to high Frankfurt school analysis, where such art garners its political potential wholly via self-­referential formal experimentation. 79.  A story for another day would be to investigate possible alternative sources of (aesthetic) pleasure that rapid cut-­and-­paste style music might produce. Do we end up focusing on moment-­to-­moment timbre shifts, or might a horizontal musical form emerge in an unexpected way?

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than barren works. In this sense the Art Ensemble employs the methods of postmodern art production in what can be seen as very much a modernist, if not romantic, manner, for they still foreground aesthetics as opposed to attempting to annihilate it. There is no need to see this as a backward gesture per se, but it is I think a critique of what many see as postmodernity’s quest for theory-­and history-­free art objects. The Art Ensemble’s practices question both the desirability and possibility of such art, and one might well agree with this critique. The Art Ensemble, and more generally the AACM, seek to valorize what they see as the history of black music, and they wish to continue to contribute to this history (but, of course, on their terms). While they obviously do not stand outside of the history of European postwar art production (and neither does black experimental music more generally), they see no necessity to produce works that speak directly to the social and cultural issues that gave birth to postmodernity (in particular, the European experience of WWII and its aftermath, and the Holocaust).80 Bringing the history of African diasporic music and culture into dialogue with a pan-­ European history results in a body of work that draws on many of the sonic hallmarks and freedoms of postmodern musics, but it does not and need not reject either its own past or the value, importance, and perhaps inevitability of aesthetics. While postmodernism is often seen as anti-­aesthetic, perhaps the greatest contribution the Art Ensemble (and other like-­minded, particularly AACM-­based, groups) have made is to show how the artistic language of postmodernity could be used not to void, but to enrich, our aesthetic lives and so our lives more generally. There is an interesting way to see how improvisational practices such as those just discussed might achieve an aesthetic effect that is in many ways postmodern in spirit, yet in a fashion more clearly aligned with modernism. This is accomplished by, on the one hand, considering such practices from the perspective of what is often called “relational aesthetics,” and on the other hand by recognizing that modernity and postmodernity themselves act as genres, and so can themselves serve as oft-­contested perspectives from which to consider any given artwork. AACM and related improvisers, whose practices both draw on and suggest modernist and postmodernist sources, therefore invite consideration from both perspectives and call into question the boundaries between these movements construed as genres, and the distinct histories of production and reception which they often assume. This is what I want to pursue here. 80.  And so, as we will see, they deny the appropriateness of European/American modernist/postmodernist dichotomies to discuss their works, given their reductionist tendencies.

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I shall proceed as follows. First, taking up and continuing the lucid discussion of modernism and postmodernism found in Born, Rationalizing Culture, I argue that the Art Ensemble draws on both traditions quite consciously, and therefore creates a corpus of ambiguous musical works. I claim that this tension between viewing the productions of the Art Ensemble as modernist vs. postmodernist mirrors not only the overlapping natures of these categories (as Born clearly demonstrates) but serves to again aesthetically thicken these works. Finally, we compare how such genre ambiguity relates to the stated goals of relational aesthetics, demonstrating that this ambiguity allows the audience to help create the musical work in the manner found to be a desirable goal of art according to this rather new and influential aesthetic theory.81 Along the way we reference both works and comments by the Art Ensemble and related AACM ensembles to help demonstrate that this is not merely an academic construct thrust on the Art Ensemble in particular and the AACM in general, but is part of their intended practices. While by now the fault lines between modernism and postmodernism have been well established, it is worth revisiting this familiar territory to see in broad terms how the AACM situates their practices with respect to these two artistic and cultural practices/genres. Modernism, when applied to music, is often characterized as a response to, and ultimately a rejection of, the romanticism and classicism that dominated Western art music of the nineteenth century. Insofar as the harmonic, melodic, and structural tonality that characterized the music of the nineteenth century was rejected by modernists through a move to atonality and ambiguous tonality, modernism is seen as embracing a negative aesthetics, that is, a denial of a musical aesthetics that assumes the value and naturalness of tonality. Musical modernism, as characterized by Born, is also acutely concerned with new media, technology, and science. Related to this turn to science is the theoretical nature of modernism. New musical forms and even individual works are often accompanied by theory, explained via theory, and justified according to theory. Modernism’s break with tonality is legitimized via theory that often also serves to criticize and devalue earlier tonal music and alternatives to modernism. Modernism is also seen as making politically vanguardist and interventionist claims, but often rhetorically and metaphorically, via its critique of 81.  It is a matter of scholarly debate just how new relational aesthetics is, and, in particular, its relationship to movements such as the situationists, Fluxus, and, more generally, to the history of the function of audience participation in art.

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extant musical traditions. The critiques tend to be limited to artworks and art traditions, and in keeping with the formalism that arose with modernism, are discharged by the artwork’s formal features. Adorno is perhaps the most influential theorist of modernist music in particular, and modernist art more generally, to take this stance. These aspects of modernism also suggest a futurist element (as with, for example, the Futurists) when such a forward glance is often taken, in and of itself, to be a critique of the present. As Born makes clear, one needs to be careful when it comes to characterizing modernism in general, and musical modernism in particular, via some set of rules or principles. There are streams within modernism that are more explicitly critical of precise political and social circumstances, and the concern with science is also often accompanied by elements of irrationalism and the glorification of subjectivity, giving modernism an almost schizophrenic character. A feature Born and others see as more firmly entrenched in modernist art practices is an ambivalent relationship with popular culture. Such culture is either ignored totally or used selectively, quoted or modified. The reasons for this are many, one being that much popular music, at least what is commercially produced (as opposed to assorted folk musics and ethnic musics), is wedded to traditional tonality. Even modernist composers who availed themselves of popular forms, such as Stravinsky, Debussy, Ives, and Bartok, tend still to treat the vernacular musics they appropriate as musical others, while serialism, in both its initial and later “total” forms, tends to totally ignore popular music.82 Serialism, as exemplary of modernist music, makes most clear the rationalistic, scientific, deterministic, and prescriptive tendencies of modernism. A large body of theory, often highly mathematically and scientifically technical, sprang up to generate serialist compositions, rationalize the method, criticize competitors, and ground modernist music in nonmusical academic discourse. This was accompanied by an increased interest in new, particularly electronic, technologies as the means to both produce and perform musical works. Postmodernism, and postmodernist music, are seen as rejecting many 82.  Another reason, emerging out of Frankfurt School theorizing about modernist art, is the belief that popular music, via its means of production, is a product of capitalist-­created alienated labor, and as such serves simply to placate the masses, and is (therefore) in conflict with the potentially transformational and interventionist nature of modernist art.

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of the above-­mentioned aspects of modernism, and so it too has a negative aspect, even when it returns to premodernist musical and artistic forms. Postmodernist art and music often want to overcome the strict division between high culture and its popular and vernacular counterparts. Sometimes this is accomplished by resurrecting assorted premodernist movements, filtered through the guise of modernism (neoromanticism, neoclassicism, etc.). Postmodernism also rejects the formalist aesthetics that accompanied modernism and what it sees as the elitist and antisocial tendencies of such an aesthetics. This turn to the social and political is accompanied by a sensitivity to, and focus on, issues of race, gender, class, and social difference in general. This focus on social realities is also grounded in postmodernism’s celebration of consumption and desire, two features of popular culture broadly construed that modernism sought to both denigrate and distance itself from. While postmodern music is often associated with Cage-­inspired experimentalism (with all the scientific baggage that such a term carries), it is taken to be a break with the rationalistic, deterministic, and scientific aspects of modernist music. The experiments that composers undertook often both involved and concerned indeterminacy, and were inspired by and employed, antirationalist methods (e.g., the use of esoteric belief systems and randomness-­producing methodologies). This emphasis on experimentalism as a process switched the focus in general from the musical work toward performance, and was often accompanied by a good dollop of ritual and theater. However, there is still grounding in theory, often as dogmatic as that of the serialists and postserialists, even when the theory draws on non-­ Western practices and belief systems. While postmodern music tends to draw on a wider range of non-­Western musics and popular musics, it still tends both to avoid the more commercial forms of popular music and to still attribute authorship to a single genius composer, even while giving performers greater latitude in how they determine the form the musical work takes in performance. Politically, postmodernist music tended to limit its critiques to the role and function of music and art in society, and rarely focused on wider social concerns (although later movements in postmodernist music, perhaps themselves influenced by the more overt social concerns that African American experimentalists engaged with, often turned to more pointed and broader critiques of social issues). For Born, who emphasizes the often heterodox nature of many modernist and postmodernist practices, there is a unity between the two traditions surrounding their continued “othering” of popular musics. The following

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chart, taken from Born,83 summarizes the oppositions she sees between the two traditions: Modernism/serialism, postserialism

Postmodernism/experimental music

Determinist Rationalism Scientism, universalism Cerebral, complex Text-­centered Linear, cumulative, teleological

Indeterminist, nondeterminist Irrationalism, mysticism Sociopoliticization Physical, performative, simple Practice-­centered Cyclical, repetitive, static

Born also characterizes modernism as failing to reference or acknowledge popular music, and postmodernism as referring to and transforming it. She also sees modernism’s relationship to technology as being scientistic and theoreticist, high-­tech, and institutional, but sees postmodernism as being empiricist, artisanal, low-­tech, and entrepreneurial. Finally, with respect to institutional bases, modernism is seen as based in East Coast universities, with institutional and state backing, while postmodernism is seen as primarily based in West Coast art colleges and independent institutions; it is performance-­backed, and its practitioners are self-­employed. While descriptions and comparisons between modernism and postmodernism such as those found above, and borrowed from Born, are open to debate and more detailed analysis, the distinctions here adduced in broad terms surely capture many of the distinctive features and differences of the two movements. How do the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the AACM more generally fit into these schemas? Let us take them in turn. The AACM in general, as George Lewis tells us in his magisterial A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, operates in a hybrid composer/performer model. Composition and improvisation are not divided. Quoting from a 1975 review of a Roscoe Mitchell concert (Mitchell was a founding member of the Art Ensemble) by Litweiler, we read that “much of the improvisation occurs within strictly delineated outlines. . . . Mitchell’s division of score/improvisation, invention/interpretation is to a large extent no division at all. The act of creation—­more accurately, revelation—­encompasses all these now, and it’s rather a blow to absolutist theorists.”84 The Art Ensemble practice of integrating composition and improvisation in a manner that, in effect, refuses to see a 83. Born, Rationalizing Culture, 63. 84.  Quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 322.

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difference between the two, and that unifies a particular way of making music, splits the determinist/nondeterminist divide. Their practices are both and neither, depending on one’s critical/historical perspective.85 This borrowing of elements of determinism and indeterminism is also characteristic of other AACM composer/performers, such as Anthony Braxton, whose compositions employ both highly deterministic traditionally scored notation and various, often ingenious, antideterminist notations. The integration of improvisation and composition is so total in many AACM ensembles that many do not even realize which methods are at play. I know many musically informed people who assume that Art Ensemble concerts are almost totally free improvisations (which they are not), while taking Braxton ensembles to be, in some sense or other, fully composed. There is a complex interplay between determinism and nondeterminism in both practices, which involve methods of creating music that are simply too hybrid to be described accurately with this binary.86 AACM practice in general, and Art Ensemble practice in particular, also undermines the stability of the binary of rationalism on one side and irrationalism and mysticism on the other. Here one needs to tread carefully, since elements that one might code as irrational or mystical in a given musical practice, particularly when considering the Art Ensemble, may be the product of primitivist categories that have a far from happy heritage. The rationalist elements are clear, and many Art Ensemble compositions bear all the hallmarks of rationality, such as carefully constructed lines employing advanced harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic invention, and associated rational discourse employed to discuss such works. Art Ensemble members and other AACM members are often perfectly comfortable when the occasion calls for discussing their works within discourses that code as highly rationalistic, and their performance techniques often equally code in this fashion. However, there equally are elements that might be taken to be far more naturally housed in the irrationalism/mysticism camp. Art Ensemble perfor85.  One needs to be very careful not to equate the improvisational with the aleatory. For an insightful and influential discussion of this see G. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950.” The AACM recognizes the chimerical nature of the distinction, even from within the Western art-­music performance tradition, where performers always need to make decisions and fill in blanks. What the AACM is acutely aware of is that this demands a redistribution of responsibility and authority from composer to performer. 86.  For example, Braxton’s “Echo-­Echo Mirror House” project supplies each musician with an iPod from which they can sample a variety of earlier Braxton performances while performing from a series of graphic scores, and so the present composition is merged with previous performances of other compositions, all of which involve performer-­driven interpretations of graphic scores.

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mances would normally feature Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Don Moye performing in face paint and garb that codes as African tribal. Many sonic features of Art Ensemble performances—­the sudden blast of a foghorn, a shouted or sung bit of free verse, the throwing of confetti, often interrupting an otherwise musically “rational” passage—­suggest the irrational, or at least an alternative to the “high” rationalism of modernism. The fusion of both practices, simultaneously on display, serves the further political function of having one question the primitivist assumptions one might have concerning certain practices and value systems that one might code as irrational. Is Malachi Favors’s Egyptian-­inspired mysticism primitive if he both performs with someone dressed as a scientist and performs music bearing many of the sonic hallmarks of high-­modernist art music? This dichotomy is also characterized by Born as tracking an objectivism/ subjectivism difference, which can also be seen as being played with by the Art Ensemble. Unison ensemble playing can be seen as personifying objectivism, but the performances of the Art Ensemble (here in keeping with assorted jazz traditions) often then evolve into individual, often simultaneous, improvisations that personify subjectivism. Yet once one foregrounds the intentional nature of improvisation, group improvisation can aspire to the status of the objective, for a unified group identity may be created/ expressed, one that respects the subjectivities of its individuals while having the logic and seeming inevitability of objectivist music-­making. As long as intrinsically subjectivist improvisation makes some sort of collective sense, it aspires to the objective, just as a group discussion can bear the hallmarks of the objective when a compelling argument ensues. Objectivity is not a metaphysical given (recall, even single-­composer works bear the marks of their composers’ subjectivity), but is an appearance, a property that supervenes on others, and may well emerge out of group improvisation. In addition, the fractured subjectivity of multiple simultaneous improvisations can be seen as personifying the multiple authentic selves that bell hooks has argued are paradigmatic of the black artist. In this sense, subjectivity becomes objective, being seen as a natural outgrowth of African American lived experiences. Perhaps the best way to see the use of both the rational and the irrational/mystical in AACM practices is to consider Braxton’s magnum opus, the three-­volume Tri-­Axium Writings. At one level it reads as highly rationalistic, with sections called “Underlying Philosophical Bases,” “Extended Functionalism,” “Affinity Dynamics,” and so on. The writing is often dense, technical, and scholarly. The whole project has an element of serialist composition inherent in it. Braxton tells us, at the very beginning, that:

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The Dictates of these books are constructed so that the reader must read through the material in at least six different ways, and the interconnection of concepts [is] set up so as to give maximum diversity. . . . Thus, to really utilize this book in the way I have intended, the reader is expected to read this book: (1) completely from the beginning to the end; (2) with respect to the arguments of only one level region at a time. . . . [The reader is also expected to] (3) read the whole book interconnected with the other books in this series through what I call the integration code . . . ; (4) [to] read only the isolated concepts that have been marked in bold type; (5) [to] study the isolated terminology chart or glossary of terms . . . to understand the systemic interconnection (as well as application) of these concepts throughout the total integration complex of all three books . . . ; and (6) the reader is asked to translate my terminology . . . as a means to view each focus in one’s own terms. . . . Only after all of the approaches have been tried can the reader have some idea as to what I am trying to communicate.87 This is some task, seeing that the Tri-­Axium Writings total some 1,700 pages! Braxton asks the reader to treat the book as a tone row and read it in assorted predetermined ways. Only once one has done so is the task of reading the book complete; only then has the “work been performed.” Yet at the same time Braxton foregrounds the importance of the reader’s intervention into the text and its topics: “I am saying, ‘this is my viewpoint in this context, and these are my terms, but what do you think?—­with respect to your own personal viewpoint and/or perception dynamics (in the context of my terminology—­as well as your own terminology) about this same information.’”88 In effect the relationship the reader is intended to have to these writings is very like the way a performer is intended to approach a Braxton score—­redolent with the complexity of both determined and antideterministic elements. There is a precise way to navigate through the book (as with many of his scores), but what ultimately matters is “What do you think?”—­how should one realize in sound the scored instructions, or what is one to make of the rich and dense ideas proffered in the Tri-­Axium Writings? In other words, an exemplary “high modernist” musical style, total serialism, is employed, but with a very postmodernist spin, given the invitation 87. Braxton, Tri-­Axium Writings, vi–­x. 88. Braxton, Tri-­Axium Writings, x.

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to readers to, in effect, perform this text as they see fit, to enter into dialogue with the nominal author/composer, and so to help fix the work’s meaning.89 But for all the highly complex, rational, structured elements of the Tri-­Axium Writings, there is also a rather mystical/metaphysical aspect to it. There is much talk of degrees of reality, other worlds, assorted forms of consciousness, and so on. These writings (and, for example, Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music) refuse to divide the rational from the irrational, spiritual, mystical, and subconscious. The writings, and much of the music they engender, are not so much irrational as cognizant of the fact that rationality does not exhaustively capture our essences as humans or music-­makers. There is no contradiction here, no irreconcilable divide between the rational and the irrational, as Braxton’s writings and music, like the Art Ensemble’s, realize that both are parts of us and that music need not speak to only one of these parts. By having elements of their music coding as hyperrational, and as perhaps hyperirrational (to many), they force us to think about this divide, its role in the history of music production and criticism, and what follows from its role as a genre-­distinguishing feature. The scientism/sociopoliticization divide is equally problematized by the Art Ensemble and the AACM. Lester Bowie would regularly wear a lab coat while performing, emphasizing the experimental nature of their music and directly referencing scientific institutions and practice.90 Yet much of the discourse surrounding the AACM, including the Art Ensemble, by both members themselves and critics, foregrounds the sociopolitical nature of their practices. We will look as some of these statements shortly, but for now it is worth noting that in effect, the science taking place in AACM practices, the experiments being undertaken, are not just musical but are sociopolitical, again serving to undercut the distinction between the two inherent in the modernism/postmodernism divide. The fusion of the two is also found in the Tri-­Axium Writings. The complex “Glossary-­Integration Abbreviations,” which contribute to the “scientific” aspect of Braxton’s writings, include seven terms concerning politics, seven concerning social realities, and many others that clearly reference aspects of culture and society.91 The sociopoliticization is built into the science in Braxton’s theories; they are not opposed to each other. 89. And this foregrounding of reader/performer agency is equally characteristic of an Afrological aesthetics. 90.  It is also often said (by Bowie himself ) to be a chef ’s uniform, yet as the years passed, it became more the uniform of an experimental chef presenting molecular cuisine à la Ferran Adrià than that of a burger-­flipper. 91. Braxton, Tri-­Axium Writings, xvi–­xxii and 496–­533.

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The divide between the cerebral and the physical is equally collapsed by the Art Ensemble. The complexity of their music is a given, and it at times codes as cerebral, yet it is equally highly performative and physical. The musicians are in costume, the stage is full of instruments. At times the whole band may be banging hard on a variety of percussion instruments, while tubes are spun overhead, alarms go off, and bits of colored paper are thrown about. The music is performative in the extreme. When I first taught the music of the Art Ensemble, many students came up to me and said, “We understand what you are saying, we just don’t get/like the music.” They found it too cerebral, too distant from what they normally listened to. I then showed them a video of the Art Ensemble performing live in Chicago, and they sat rapt with attention even after the bell sounded to end the class. Almost to a person they then said, “Now we get it!” What they needed was access to the performativity and physicality of the concerts. Again, the Art Ensemble (and other AACM ensembles) have the cerebral and the physical enter into a dialectic, so to speak. The performative features help to make the more cerebral aspects more familiar, while the often highly abstract music helps rid one of false generalizations concerning the lack of cognitive content to music made by folks banging on wooden slabs (generalizations often with racist primitivist origins). We have already seen how the text-­centered/practice-­centered divide is denied by the AACM in general and the Art Ensemble in particular. As for the linear/cyclical divide, this too is questioned. Art Ensemble performances (like other AACM performance, such as “Silence” discussed above) may include compositions with little musical movement, which are in this sense static. They may also at times employ black popular musical forms that stress cyclicality and repetitiveness, such as funk. Yet equally, there are stretches that are highly linear, with complex musical horizontal form, and they garner their interest cumulatively. Art Ensemble concerts as a whole, often comprised of a series of compositions performed without intervening pauses, and with highly improvisational transitional passages, tend to have an overall teleological arc, often ending with one of the Art Ensemble theme songs (often “Odwalla,” or “Funky AEOC”). Bits of Art Ensemble performances may sonically reference the repetitive, cyclical nature of postmodern experimentalists such as Steve Reich (but with none of his hatred of improvisation, of course!), while others would manifest the rigorous forward-­looking logic of high-­modernist composition, sometime evincing both simultaneously. The Art Ensemble’s relationship to popular musics, particularly those emerging out of the African American community, does not share the ambivalence discerned in both modernism and postmodernism. While large parts

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of their performances do not reference or employ the hallmarks of black popular musics, other parts clearly do in a manner that is the product of a deep understanding of these musics, of both their histories and their means of production. Funk, blues, jazz, rock, and reggae may all make their ways into Art Ensemble performances. The band’s motto, “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future,” states clearly what they take their practices’ relationship to popular black musical forms to be. In some of their musical projects outside of the Art Ensemble, Art Ensemble members embrace openly popular musical forms. Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, for example, performed many classic rock and pop songs, while Don Moye, prior to joining the Art Ensemble, was a rhythm-­and-­blues drummer. This point is important, for both the modernist’s and postmodernist’s distain for popular music is manifest not only internally to their musical compositions but in their other musical activities: they shun such musics. Cage, when asked about jazz, (in)famously quipped “I don’t think about jazz.”92 Here it is not only the performance of popular music that is avoided, but even any cognitive connection to it; it is not a proper subject for thought. While the AACM was created with the strong mandate to produce original music, this did not entail turning their collective back on black popular musical traditions. Popular musical forms are not considered as a musical “other” by the AACM, even when their practices may bear few sonic hallmarks drawn from this varied tradition.93 While the Art Ensemble has never embraced high-­tech performance means (employing electronics only sparingly), the AACM as a whole embraces everything from the most cutting-­edge use of computer-­driven music-­making through the construction of home-­made acoustic instruments. While the AACM has not often had economic access to high-­tech means of producing and recording, one does not get the sense that they have a philosophical basis for either employing or refusing to employ technologies. Their overall empiricist, artisanal, and low-­tech bricolage relationship to technology may reflect their suspicion of, and often their lack of access to, the institutional support that high-­tech music production 92.  Quoted in George Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950.” 93.  See G. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, particularly Chapters Four and Five, for a discussion of the early AACM’s relationship to jazz and other musics that the economics of the musical industry had forced them to play. While the early discourse is often critical of such music, it always takes a subtle and sophisticated stand toward them (never simply being dismissive), and recognizes that any discussion of them is not just of the musical forms they employ but rather must consider them as embedded in a particular economic culture of the production and consumption of music.

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requires. Their relationship to electronics is more pragmatic than theoretical; it is used or avoided according to the dictates of musical sense. No ideology is seen as accompanying any individual decision concerning the employment of electronics.94 From all the perspectives that divide modernism from postmodernism that we have discussed, the Art Ensemble (and the greater AACM) dismantles the distinctions, draws on both halves, can be considered profitably from either perspective, at times engages in practices that best code as one or the other, and more generally interrogate the distinction itself. As they and others do with traditional musical genre categories, the AACM does with modernism and postmodernism considered as genres—­they reveal the porous nature of the categories themselves and invite those who care to consider their practices from either, neither, or a hybrid perspective. Perhaps the most telling manner in which the AACM in general, and the Art Ensemble in particular, fails to enter into the modernist/postmodernist debates is by refusing to present their music and associated theoretical critical discourses as negating some other particular discourse.95 Both modernism and postmodernism have these strong critical or negative aspects, which seem absent from AACM practice, as a matter of both choice and theory. In Chapter Seven of A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis surveys some of the critical discourse surrounding the AACM in Paris in 1969. For example, the sociologist Alfred Willener, theorizing about free jazz in general and the AACM in Paris in particular, elides their musical practices with a postmodernist explanation and justification of the Paris student uprisings of 1968. His attempts to force these musical practices into a European cultural/social/ political history that starts with dada and surrealism and moves through the French avant-­garde in theater and cinema, commit him to seeing an abandonment of the “interplay between integration and nonintegration into an existing order”96 in the music, a claim as silly concerning the Art Ensemble 94.  In conversation, George Lewis once quipped, when I asked him somewhat naively why he embarked on computer-­driven composition, “I wanted to make a machine that could play, man!” Now of course Lewis has described his motivations and methods in far greater theoretical detail. The point of the offhand comment, I take it, is to foreground the artistic, intentional, and musical reasoning behind his choice. It was not driven by an ideological commitment. 95. Of course, they often disagree with the particular comments of critics, who they believe misunderstand the music, its motives, or what have you. Yet what they most strongly object to, as we shall see, is having their musical practices pigeonholed as a single ideology, methodology, or philosophy, such as modernism or postmodernism. 96.  As cited in G. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 239.

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as it is of Coltrane’s “Ascension.” He also sees, internal to what he considers to be the black jazz avant-­garde, a break with its immediate past of Coltrane and Coleman and their emphasis on developed style and instrumental virtuosity in favor of a more ephemeral, immediate gratification. Adding to this a patina of black radical politics, Willener suggests that “The pointing of (instruments by AACM musicians) at the white audience may represent the brandishing of a machine-­gun.”97 Here is an example of how the music of the AACM can be received and theorized about by those wedded to one particular side of the modernist/ postmodernist debate. This is not to say that aspects of such accounts might not be of value and even informative, but they assume that the concerns of the AACM are never opposed to, or even different from, those that a particular account presents. They are in this sense reductive and objectivist accounts. Crucially, they fail to consider the discourse of the AACM members themselves; for all their attempted glorification of the new music, they wrench control of the discourse from the music’s creators and take it on for their own.98 Although modernism and postmodernism often share features, bleed into each other, and have therefore rather opaque boundaries, where they appear to be both clearly opposed and rigid is at the level of the discourses associated with them. These are almost always clearly opposed, and when critics associated with one of the two camps turn their eye toward the AACM (or free jazz, for that matter), they discern (or more properly, create) a very circumscribed set of motivations, functions, allegiances, interests, and values. So the AACM in Paris are either promulgating black nationalism, or expanding on European art music, or completing the work of the dadaists, or what have you. They assume there is one preferred critical lens from which to judge these works, one aesthetic that is appropriate for making sense of their music. But what is both clear and, I have been arguing, the great aesthetic strength of the AACM, is the fact that they themselves are

97.  G. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 240. Is it too far a stretch to suggest that the cover art of Message to Our Folks may be a parody of these claims by Willener? (Roscoe Mitchell, in personal correspondence, states that at the time he was not aware of Willener’s thesis.) 98.  It is often claimed that to truly make art social and relational, one must erase all authority of the author/artist/creator, as with assorted “death of the author” theories. However, the communal nature of assorted art practices, including group improvisations, need not abandon wholesale the perspective of a composer/author/creator. It is too easy to replace the seeming tyranny of the single creator with the tyranny of the mob.

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not wed to a single critical discourse from which to judge their own works.99 They are doing many things: engaging with a number of distinct musical traditions, social histories, cultural models, and so on. As they engage in musical dialogue among themselves, they are bringing into dialogue these often-­opposed discourses and histories. Nor are they critical per se of any given perspective, as they are not engaged in a war between theories as much as a battle to be seen as the legitimate spokespersons of their own artistic practices. This multiple-­genre perspective, and the resultant aesthetic thickening of their works, is a natural and perhaps inevitable result of the multiple notions of authenticity that theorists such as bell hooks have seen as following from being an African American, or, more generally, that Paul Gilroy has seen as following from being a colonized people.100 Such multifaceted authenticities have yielded a similarly rich and varied aesthetics internal to the Afrological tradition.101 This has gone underrecognized, and so its significance has gone largely ignored. The music of the AACM speaks both to Cage and to the American experimentalist tradition, may at times have little if anything to directly do with politics (as with much modernism), may suggest rationality, may contain dadaist moments, may advance theories of scored composition, may engage in free improvisation, may . . . Crucially, this is not bricolage, since bricolage is not merely a technique, but a technique embedded in a postmodernist discourse. AACM methods are employed on their own terms, in keeping with their own aesthetic and history. This may well be why Joseph Jarman, in a statement that clearly seems to want to distance AACM practices from both modernist and postmodernist discourse, states that “the critics have called [our music] avant-­garde, they have called it the New Thing, but we have only one name for it: Great Black Music.”102 Jarman, calling it neither “avant-­garde” as with the modernists nor the “New Thing” as with the postmodernists, references both race and aesthetics in creating a malleable genre term for the music of the Art Ensemble and the AACM more generally. Much has been made of the “black” in “Great Black Music,” and as Lewis so nimbly discusses, issues of race certainly did 99.  Stuart Hall states, in consideration of black art generally, that “blacks are as ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to high modernism” (Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” 22). 100.  See, for example, hooks, Art on my Mind, and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. 101.  The use here of “authenticity” should not be confused with those usages that either follow from, or are used to support, various forms of racial and cultural essentialism. 102.  In Wilmer, “Caught in the Act,” 26.

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permeate early AACM discussions concerning both membership in the association and theory more generally. But here Jarman’s comment appears most directly to be functioning as a term to distance AACM practice from the white American/European modernist/postmodernist debates. The use of “black,” far from necessarily assuming principles of racial essentialism that one might find questionable, serves to indicate the multiplicity of perspectives from which their artistic practices are thereby fruitfully considered—­a product of the hybridity and multivocality seen by many to be inherent in African American artistic practices.103 It is a genre term that contains internal to itself a host of other genre terms. Like a Russian doll, this genre is itself essentially multiple. The possible confusion concerning the essentialist use of “black” may well be intended, and meant to reflect the common essentialist reading of “jazz” that this expression is intended, in a sense, to supplant. Jazz studies, broadly construed, has from its genesis focused on the articulation and defense of conflicting essentializing definitions of jazz. Similarly, “black” and its cognates, as essentialized racial terms, have historically been foisted on those whom the terms intend to denote by often racist and “white”-­created discourses and practices. Both “jazz” and “black” in their essentialist formulations are the product of overtly racist discourses, and so the use of “black” in the expression “Great Black Music,” as employed by the AACM with a conscious intent to problematize essentialist readings of the term, can be seen as a neat and effective way to call into question the dual essentialisms often at play behind discussions of both race and jazz. Of course, like all genre terms, Great Black Music means different things to different people, and suggests distinct perspectives from which to judge such music.104 To some the term may seem to be a provocation, to others 103.  Such hybridity is found beyond just the African American community, yet this community often recognizes this hybridity and uses it as the basis for artistic practice and theorizing. The legacy of slavery also gives their particular hybridity an element that both powerfully informs many of their art practices and theories and sets apart the particular cultural/historical matrix from which their art issues. 104.  Others with “skin in the game” have proposed other new genre terms to pick out the variety of musics developed and performed by African Americans. “American classical music” was, following Alain Locke, used by Amiri Baraka, and picked up by many. This expression also incorporates assorted political points (about aesthetic worth, about high-­art status, about origins), but has also been used to import assorted discourses and practices from European classical music into jazz that have not all been obviously to the betterment of the art form, such as the establishment of repertoire jazz ensembles, and the assumption that musicological analysis developed to unpack European classical music can be imported wholesale to the analysis of jazz.

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simply a falsehood, or merely the wrapping of a political package around the music. How one might respond to this category depends on what one takes Great Black Music to be, and why one might think that this name is being employed. The important point (as will become clear) is that it is a genre term. Jarman does not claim that their practices are, say, nonidiomatic—­he does not attempt to rid the music of the AACM of a perspective from which to consider it, however flexible and internally multiperspectival this genre may be. Great Black Music, according to its creators, engages with numerous musical traditions, assorted cultural histories, and any number of political agendas—­or none. If many European improvisers were contemporaneously attempting to shed a particular judgmental perspective on their music, the AACM were, in effect, multiplying the perspectives from which their works need to be interrogated, forcing one to consider their music in a number of ways, leaving an audience either confused or, after contemplation and realization of the complexity behind the genre, bedazzled by a music that mediates and speaks to many traditions.105 In the wake of National Socialism, many European improvisers sought to shed the tethers that tied their musical practices to recent European history, and so had to move to an “antigenre” nonidiomatic style of improvisation, since genres, by their very nature, pick out a history (and herein lies the tension, if not incoherence, within nonidiomatic improvisation). The AACM, in the wake of slavery, Jim Crow, and the continued disenfranchisement of African American artists and citizens, pegs their musical practices in numerous histories, themselves fluid and mixed, as if to oppose the musical segregation that accompanies single fixed genres. At the risk of engaging in too close a reading, we should reconsider briefly 105.  In the program notes to the Art Ensemble’s first concert at the Theatre du Lucernaire on June 12, 1969, the writer of the program notes, David Nijinski, wrote: “It sounds like Xenakis. . . . Wait, there’s Stockhausen, with a beat to boot—­here a pop progression, there we’re a bit bored—­Klangfarben melodie—­etc., etc. The AACM does everything. Coming into the Lucernaire, watch out for how they’re picking your pockets; you’ll be beaten, robbed, then abused, and sent back totally naked and crying for your mother. But certainly not back home. . . . If you knew how to listen to the AACM of Chicago, you would become, all at once, a subversive terrorist. You’ll see how intoxicating it is to kidnap Boulez, to kill Berio, or to beat up Xenakis.” Quoted in George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 223 (translation by G. Lewis). This passage, while recognizing the potential of the Art Ensemble’s aesthetic density to disrupt and reconfigure one’s assumptions about jazz and black music more generally, cannot avoid on the one hand reinscribing the “jungle” metaphor so often applied to jazz (in an earlier section of the program notes), and on the other assuming that their goal is a sort of “subversive terrorist” activity, as opposed to situating their practice as being very much in keeping with black use of intertextuality and hybridity.

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the Art Ensemble album, Message to Our Folks. It opens with a sermon-­based piece, which speaks clearly to the gospel and related musics of the black church in America that both stand outside of and predate musical modernism. It then moves to a bebop classic, where bebop has often been coded as modernist music par excellence, at least the closest thing to modernism that so-­called vernacular musics have offered up (and theorists of modernity with respect to architecture and literature have been quicker to embrace the modernist credentials of jazz than those in music; perhaps some turf wars underlie this difference). What follows, however ironically performed, is a rock-­inspired piece, therefore referencing popular music, and the different, if equally ambivalent, relationship modernism and postmodernism stand in with respect to popular music, particularly rock. The album concludes with “A Brain for the Seine,” a work that sonically references a number of archetypical postmodernist musical tropes.106 So how are we to consider this album—­modernist, or postmodernist? It is clear that we are invited to employ a number of distinct genre perspectives and to create assorted hybrid viewpoints. One of the messages of Message to Our Folks is that “their” music does not naturally belong in any one genre and is not a product of, or responsive to, one critical stream. Yet again, this is not bricolage in the postmodern sense. Unlike rapid bricolage cut and paste, the AACM’s multigenre music, while destabilizing fixed genre positions from which to judge it, does not intend, nor does it achieve, a denial of aesthetic relevance in the traditional sense. Their desire, ably achieved, to produce “art” is not at the cost of separating their practices from social and political relevance, as postmodernist theorists would have it. The members of the AACM, to my knowledge, have never dwelled on a seeming disjoint between art practices as traditionally conceived,107 and art that may both mediate, and effect change in, social realities—­a disjoint that, in varying ways, is a foundational belief of assorted postmodern art practices. Perhaps because, unlike most postmodernists, the AACM does not start from a position of Marxist/neo-­Marxist critiques of 106.  An alternative and complementary proposal, suggested to me by David Collins, has it that this progression tracks a historical development of black music, from spirituals, through jazz and rock, to culminate in experimental music, but experimental music grounded in the tradition of Afrological musical practices, not European ones, and so distancing this experimentalism from perhaps sonically similar Eurological examples. 107.  Those that, among other things, produce works and are intended to engage aesthetic sensibilities as historically conceived, including concepts such as beauty, that is, what is often widely if misleadingly characterized as a Kantian conception of art.

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capitalism and the bourgeois mainstream art practices and institutions to which capitalism is seen as giving rise, they do not feel the self-­imposed pressure to deny (whatever the costs, and however problematic such a denial may be—­consider the International Situationists’ tortured relationship to traditional art practices108) the relevance and potential politically transformative power of art as traditionally conceived. The Great Black Music that they see their practices as representing does not have a history as a bourgeois music, nor emerge out of such a history. Unlike their modernist and postmodernist cousins, the AACM is not grafting the vernacular and popular onto the high-­art world. Rather, they are in effect demanding critical attention for musics often treated as worthy of neither sophisticated critical examination nor collective endorsement of the sort high art enjoys from the mainstream due to their vernacular and popular means of production and consumption. We now need to see how such a practice is intended to have political and socially instrumental functions and how it can discharge such functions in light of postmodern critiques of the political efficacy of art as traditionally practiced. Recall, the claim is not that the art of the AACM is traditional, either as a practice or product, but that it “fails” to situate itself with respect to the tradition of art practices and products in an oppositional manner that much postmodern theorizing sees as necessary for art to reclaim its emancipatory potential. The challenge is this: Can art embrace beauty, intend to please, delight the senses, and yet remain emancipatory? Can one, in this sense, fuse the social with the aesthetic?109 We have already seen how questioning and problematizing the modernist/postmodernist distinction can itself be a political gesture. Now I want to argue for a particular way in which AACM practices embody a social aesthetics that may not be obvious. It is commonplace to recognize the degree to which the AACM, both as an organization and via its art practices, is invested in wider social issues related to the improvement of their community. Whether this is an attempt to seize control of the means of production 108.  See, for example, Griel Marcus’s essay “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” 109.  Many artists closely associated with the relational aesthetics movement, and whose art is prominently featured in the Palais Toyko in Paris, refuse to even consider discussion of their work in any of the terms traditionally associated with aesthetics. They shun all traditional aesthetics predicates and deny that their art has any symbolic function. See, for example, those artists interviewed in the short film, Art Safari—­Relational Art: Is It an Ism?, directed by Ben Lewis. For a variety of ways of addressing this question see Born, Lewis, and Straw, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics.

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and dissemination of their music (with the expected results of improved economic rewards, improved conditions of artistic presentation, and greater artistic control over product), or the establishment of a school of music for Southside Chicago youth, “the AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.”110 Such efforts, clearly and elegantly articulated time and again by AACM members since the organization’s founding, should not, as important as they are, be taken to exhaust the ways in which such practices engage with the political and the everyday (as political). Let us see how their musical practices, particularly with respect to its multigenre and multiperspective nature, can be seen as fulfilling the objectives of relational/ participatory aesthetics that has as its explicit goal the socialization of art practices. In particular, we shall see how this function is discharged in a manner that has clear ontological ramifications: that the AACM achieves the goal of relational aesthetics of blurring the artist/audience divide by allowing the audience to participate in the creation of the work. In this sense the AACM endorses and acts on the thesis that social pluralism may follow from aesthetic pluralism. One key tenet of relational aesthetics stresses the degree to which artistic form, once perhaps thought to reside wholly in the relationship of the material parts of an artwork to each other, actually emerges through a dialogical encounter between the artwork/artist and a viewer. This dialogue, its very act as an encounter, is seen as the goal of much contemporary art. We read the following in Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, the ur-­text for much theorizing in this area: The form of an artwork issues from a negotiation with the intelligible, which is bequeathed to us. Through it, the artist embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic practice thus resides in the invention of relations between consciousness. Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of each artist is a bundle of relations, with the world, given rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. . . . 111 As part of a “relationist” theory of art, inter-­subjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the 110.  Abrams and Jackson, “Special Report,” 74. 111.  This can be usefully compared with Born’s discussion above on digitally mediated musical works and their “throwing off” chains of relations.

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reception of art, which is its “environment,” its “field” (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice.112 Reconsider now, for example, Braxton’s claim that while reading his Tri-­ Axium Writings in a high-­modernist fashion, what is really important is how you respond to and consider his text. It is the resultant dialogue between the text and the reader that creates, in Bourriaudian terms, the form of the work. Braxton is very much interested in setting up the encounter between the reader and the text, an encounter without a fixed resolution. Again, we have here the fusion of high modernism (the text as total serial composition) and postmodernism (the text/artwork as a site for dialogical encounter). It should also be clear how Bourriaud’s description of how artistic form can emerge via dialogue among artists—­the relationships between consciousnesses—­is an apt and rather precise description of collective improvised music-­making. This raises an interesting question: why is Bourriaud silent concerning improvised music, since it appears, on the face of it, to be a kind of relational art par excellence? In Claire Bishop’s introduction to Participation, a collection of essays she edited on the social nature of participatory art codified around the term “relational aesthetics” as coined by Bourriaud, she identifies three themes of participatory art:

1. Activation—­the desire to create an active subject, one who will be socially and politically empowered by their physical or symbolic participation in the art. 2. Authorship—­the desire to cede authorial control from an individual artist onto a collective—­and viewing this collaborative creativity as modeling a more egalitarian social structure. 3. Community—­reinstilling collective responsibility as a positive response to capitalist-­inspired alienation.113

Much of the art that this collection discusses attempts to achieve these goals not merely by having an “audience” interact with the art object in new ways, but by having the audience actually participate in the art object itself by having, in various ways, these participants create the work, often via episodic interactions with assorted sites, objects, and situations. 112. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. 113. Bishop, Participation.

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There is much to say about how such art problematizes traditional conceptions of the artwork and notions of the completeness of artworks (among other issues). What should be clear from the gloss Bishop gives on activation/authorship/community is that these artistic goals are very much in keeping with many accounts of group improvised music; indeed, they read like a précis of the new scholarship on improvised music that has emerged in the past twenty-­odd years. Given the fact that the AACM’s however-­brief tenure in Paris in the late ’60s is seen by many as a pivotal moment in the wider dissemination of such improvisational practices, and that relational aesthetics was created and codified in Paris thereafter, leaves open the possibility that we again are faced with a situation akin to that which George Lewis has argued for—­the influence of black artistic practices on European-­ inspired art movements, but an influence that goes unrecognized and is theorized away. The following statement by AACM founding members Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson nicely captures the “community” theme: “The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.”114 This passage echoes their claim that the primary concerns of the AACM are “survival, accountability and achievement.” The collective responsibility they have in mind concerns the community of black artists and the wider community these artists’ represent and partially constitute: “In the area of accountability, Black artists should be held responsible to their brothers and sisters, who, in turn, should demand excellence and give their support to Black endeavours.”115 This theme is explicitly related to participation and activation in the following passage: The AACM is attempting to precipitate activity geared towards finding a solution to the basic contradictions which face Black people in all facets of human structures, particularly cultural and economic. There is an incessant demand in Black communities to solve the disparity between participation and nonparticipation in the social process. Our concerts and workshops in the schools and in the community are an effort to expose our Black brothers and sisters to creative artists contemporary to their time and present to them a factual 114.  Abrams and Jackson, “Special Report,” 72. 115.  Abrams and Jackson, “Special Report,” 72.

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account of their glorious past as an undergirding for facing the future. Demonstrating the creation and production of art will enhance the cultural and spiritual posture of a people and it is our firm belief that artistic appreciation will so enhance cultural and spiritual growth that the individual’s participation in the social process will be highly accelerated. It is the contention of the AACM that it is not the potential which Black people have which will determine what they do but, rather, how they feel about themselves. Finally, the AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political freedom and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies. This will not only create a new day for Black artists but for all Third World inhabitants; a new day of not only participation but also of control.116 Here participation in social processes that might better their community is explicitly tied to participation in the creation of art. Artistic growth is almost presented as a prerequisite for social growth or change, a belief tacitly behind many art movements that endorse some version of relational aesthetics. Participation is also closely linked to control—­authorial, political, and economic. The AACM, like other like-­minded black-­artist activist cooperatives, have their music/artistic products and their organizational structures themselves model a more participatory egalitarian culture. The above statements clearly endorse the activation/authorship/community trichotomy, and seem in sympathy with Jacques Rancière’s claim that “it is not a misunderstanding of the existing state of affairs that nurtures the submission of the oppressed, but a lack of confidence in their own capacity to transform it.”117 AACM practices and art serve to instill this transformative capacity in their community. This suggests a perhaps radical thesis, that jazz practices in general, and certainly the music of the AACM and other like-­minded musicians, are a clear historical precedent to the art practices of those who Bourriaud calls “relational artists.” In his essay “Art of the 1990s,” Bourriaud tells us that contemporary art takes “dialogue as the actual origin of the image-­making process.”118 He adds that “artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere 116.  Abrams and Jackson, “Special Report,” 74. 117.  Quoted in Bishop, Participation, 83. 118. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 26.

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of inter-­human relations, as illustrated by artistic activities that have been in progress since the early 1990s.”119 Such comments seem to easily describe improvised musical performances, and would hardly seem out of place in any social history of jazz.120 Of course, jazz practices have had this character arguably from their beginnings, and they certainly were brought to the fore far earlier than the 1990s. Does relational art perhaps aspire to the form of improvised music and attempt to transcend its historical form without becoming “mere” performance art? The affinity of jazz practices to the manner in which Bourriaud thinks about contemporary art is graphically brought into the light in an extended passage from his essay “Space-­Time Exchange Factors,” which reads, quite frankly, like a policy statement from ICASP/IICSI:121 We find ourselves, with relational artists, in the presence of a group of people who, for the first time since the appearance of conceptual art in the mid sixties, in no way draw sustenance from any re-­ interpretation of this or that past aesthetic movement. Relational art is not the revival of any movement, nor is it the comeback of any style. It arises from an observation of the present and from a line of thinking about the fate of artistic activity. Its basic claim—­the sphere of human relations as artwork venue—­has no prior example in art history . . . this generation of artists considers intersubjectivity and interaction neither as fashionable theoretical gadgets, nor as additives (alibis) of a traditional artistic practice. It takes them as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief, as the main informers of their activity. The space where their works are displayed is altogether the space of interaction, the space of openness that ushers in all dialogue. . . . What they produce are. . . . places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed con119. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 28. 120.  What is “Blasé,” if not a work in keeping with this second quote? Bourriaud goes on to claim that “the subversive and critical function of contemporary art is now achieved in the invention of individual and collective vanishing lines, in those temporary and nomadic constructions whereby the artist models and disseminates disconcerting situations,” again a comment that seems to accurately characterize improvised works such as “Blasé.” 121.  The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) (formerly ICASP—­the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project), a Canadian-­ based international research project that the present author is a member of, and whose research concentrates on, but is not limited to, post-­1958 Afrological improvised music.

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viviality are worked out. . . . 122 The artwork is presented as a social interstice within which these experiments and these new “life possibilities” appear to be possible. . . . present-­day art is roundly taking on and taking up the legacy of the 20th-­century avant-­gardes, while at the same time challenging their dogmatism and their teleological doctrines. . . . The imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-­existences.123 This extended passage, with its talk of taking human interactions as the location of artistic practice, of foregrounding intersubjectivity and treating it as essential and natural, of creating a space of artistic interaction that valorizes dialogue and results in the construction of alternative social forms, could have been lifted wholesale from any number of works on jazz, and certainly is in keeping with the claims made above. Bourriaud goes on to characterize relational art as denying the negativity he sees inherent in much modernist and postmodernist art (as with Born), and, as the opening of the passage just quoted makes clear, instead attempting to move outside of this historical dichotomy. The line “Its basic claim—­the sphere of human relations as artwork venue—­has no prior example in art history,” shows just how far off the radar improvised musics, and jazz in particular, are for Bourriaud. For improvised music has long been theorized as a practice where human (inter)relations are very much the site of artistic creation. To improvise is in many ways to sound these relations, their past and evolving present. One might debate to what degree both jazz practices and relational art achieve these theoretical goals, but what is clear is that the discourse concerning jazz practices clearly views them as having goals such as those Bourriaud sees as characteristic of relational art, yet predates this movement, and achieves these goals, when and if they do, by other means. While Bourriaud and others are clearly concerned with contemporary art movements originating in France and coming out of the visual arts, this does not sanction ignoring African diasporic art practices, particularly given the discourse, much of it French, that evolved concerning jazz practices in general and the AACM in Paris in 1969 in particular. Might not the road from the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre where an important dada happening took place in 1921, to the Palais Tokyo, the large Paris contemporary art gallery that Bourriaud directs, pass through the Parisian Theatre du Lucer122.  Note that the English translation of this sentence mistakenly reverses its meaning. 123. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 44–­45.

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naire where the Art Ensemble of Chicago first performed in 1969? Further historical research is called for to discover whether this influence might be direct—­those invested in relational aesthetics, particularly the French, are deeply influenced by art movements and theory that arose out of and after the events of the summer of 1968 in Paris, and the French press, as George Lewis demonstrates, hardly ignored the AACM in Paris during the summer of 1969. For those who think that history is apt to repeat itself, and drawing on Lewis’s influential “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” perhaps Bourriaud is to the AACM like Cage was to bebop. If so, this would be depressing but perhaps not unexpected. It remains only to be seen how the acts of aesthetic thickening, as practiced by the AACM, help bring about these effects by investing the audience with art-­making powers. The point is simply that each genre perspective we take toward a given work or performance sees the work as having different properties with divergent aesthetic values. In this sense the work is created by audience members, since the work’s properties are not fixed until one decides to view it from a given genre perspective. And since these works invite numerous perspectives and challenge the validity of any given perspective, and so of any given history, they advocate for an extreme type of aesthetic pluralism. This aesthetic pluralism is, at the same time, an argument for social/cultural pluralism, since what is being called into question via the aesthetic pluralism is the exclusivity of single culturally determined histories, art practices, and discourses. There are, therefore, two related yet distinct ways in which such works encourage dialogue that enter into the construction of the works themselves. The first is internal—­one’s genre expectations and position are thrown into question, and so one is forced to interrogate the assumptions one is making about the work at hand and related works. The interrogation of many of these assumptions will, at the same time, be an interrogation of one’s broader social and cultural assumptions, since these broader assumptions, perhaps concerning racial, ethnic, class, or gender features of the genre in question, are what underlie many of our choices regarding which art or musical genre to consider a given work from. Noting the possibility of hybridity and its actual presence may well be a necessary prerequisite for substantive political change toward a robust multiculturalism. Seeing examples of such hybridity that yield aesthetically rich objects and therefore aesthetically rich experiences, may well help one see the desirability and rich potential of a more general social multiculturalism. based essentialist beliefs therefore The questioning of myriad genre-­

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serves to undermine more general social/cultural essentialist assumptions and reveals both the possibility and desirability of more pluralistic systems. To see how the art products of a given community may be fruitfully examined and enjoyed by considering their art to both speak to and emerge out of a number of histories and discourses is to recognize the hybrid and plural natures of the community at issue, particularly when the plurality of perspectives is not simply imposed from without but is suggested by the work and its creators. Here the relationality of such art is premised on the fact that we ourselves can place our own beliefs in dialogue with each other, and that such internal dialogue might result in a transformation of the self, leading to one becoming more open to seeing and endorsing assorted social and cultural pluralisms and hybridities. In other words, the manner in which the art practices of black avant-­ gardists in Paris in 1969 served to advance the political cause of questioning racial essentialism, via the production of musical works that undermine one’s ability to pigeonhole them into essentialist musical genre categories, can be seen as emerging from a more general, and older, element of Afrological aesthetics. As Stuart Hall tells us, “by definition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a sight [sic] of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out.”124 It is a commonplace of postcolonial studies to note and theorize about the (apparently) contradictory elements of African diasporic culture and, in particular, to note the careful negotiations and manipulations of these contradictions undertaken by black artists. Such contradictions are demonstrated not to be “mistakes”—­elements that need to be exorcized to create a consistent artistic discourse and practice—­but are shown to be the building blocks of creative artistic practices. Hall goes on to state, “In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep and varied attention to speech, in its inflections towards the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—­other forms of life, other traditions of representation.”125 Such hybridity, with its element of the contradictory, is itself theorized to be grounded in the affirmation of multiple identities by many black artists, identities considered as products 124.  Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” 26. 125.  Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” 27.

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of colonialism, and as operating as a critique of essentialist racial discourse. A clear statement of this linkage is made by bell hooks: Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-­Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity that represent blackness one-­ dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the “primitive” and promoted the notion of an “authentic” experience, seeing as “natural” those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-­existing pattern or stereotype. . . . Contemporary African-­American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes re-­inscribing notions of “authentic” black identity. . . . When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions that make diverse cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories: nationalist or assimilationist, black-­identified or white-­identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding.126 In a telling autobiographical passage from a different essay, hooks tells us that “it was listening to black musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and later John Coltrane that impress upon our consciousness a sense of versatility—­they played all kinds of music, had multiple voices.”127 While the hybridity of African diasporic art practices, their playful use of contradictions, their multivocality, and their denial of single authentic identities is now well established, it is rarely recognized that the enactment of these artistic strategies is itself employed as an aesthetic gambit—­that the aesthetic theory that emerges out of these strategies both serves to critique racial and artistic essentialism and uses these contradictions to thicken the aesthetic value of such works. What results are not works fractured from 126. hooks, Yearning, 28–­29. 127.  hooks, “‘When I Was a Young Soldier,’” 11.

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the perspective of an aesthetics bent on revealing aesthetic value, but works whose aesthetic worth can be viewed from multiple aesthetic vantage points and from assorted critical positions, and as employing varied aesthetic discourses. I hope to have demonstrated this. The music of the AACM inspires dialogue in another way also. This way is that foregrounded by relational aesthetic writings, that is, dialogue between individuals, each of whom is moved by, and so judges, a given work by an AACM ensemble from a different genre perspective. For such debates ultimately concern ontological questions about the work in question: what it is, what qualities it manifests, and how to evaluate the work in light of these. When and if consensus emerges, those in agreement have mutually constructed the work; they have symbolically entered into its creation and come to agree on what it is. The debate may resurface, and indeed at another level of analysis they may agree on what it is—­say, a work of jazz—­but disagree as to what follows from this. This debate may well reveal hidden prejudices, essentialist assumptions, and other cultural biases, which may therefore be thrown into question. Like a relational artwork where the public at large is needed to enter into encounters for the work to have any social instrumentality, for it to be, in the relational art theories’ sense, art, so too must one engage in both internal and external dialogue concerning genres for much of the music of the AACM to reveal its more interesting social and political dimensions.

Five

My Favorite Things Performance, Paraphrase, and Representation

We have now surveyed the ways in which genre positionality affects both aesthetics and political issues and how it is that genres are ontological categories. Broadly put, genre judgments affect what we take to constitute understanding of music, what might be of interest or value in a given musical work or performance, if and how it might be innovative, and even whether or not a performance is a performance of a given work—­the basic ontological question we have been pursuing. We have seen that the aesthetic thickening that results from works that invite multiple genre perspectives is characteristic of an Afrological aesthetic, and can be seen as discharging assorted anti-­essentialist agendas. We have also seen how all this takes place against a backdrop where musical works are best seen as modified via their performance, placing a large part of the responsibility for the aesthetic properties musical works have on the agency of performers, particularly improvisers. This too was shown to be a component of an Afrological aesthetic. It is time to tie all this together. The preceding discussion of genres suggests a way to ground the pure metaphysical work that the modal model does in the actual intentions of improvisers and the beliefs of communities. For the modal model, insofar as it has it that a given performance of a work may open up new possibilities for work performance, does not tell us how or why this may happen. We have seen that Afrological musical practices tend to foreground the relationship between performances and performers, as opposed to seeing the musical work/performance relation as primary. Yet looking primarily to performances—­their relations between each other and how they are best seen as modifications of musical works, works that themselves may never be completed or intended to be so—­does still require 213

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some relationship between works and their performances. After all, performances of “My Favorite Things” may properly be seen as modification of “My Favorite Things,” and not of “Stairway to Heaven.” What then, from an Afrological perspective, is the work/performance relationship such that it can be thin enough to allow for the myriad ways works might be performed, and for the variety of positions and opinions assorted auditors may have about the seeming facts of the matter, but still thick enough to let us know what musical works we are faced with performances of? I will now develop a theory of improvised work performance that is:

1. Representational—­the performance of works will be viewed as a way of representing the work so performed. 2. Epistemic—­representing a musical work will be unpacked as a way of manifesting one’s understanding of the work, often by means of paraphrasing the work. 3. Fallibilist—­musical works are “on the scene” when a given performance is susceptible to failures of representational fidelity.

This model will be shown to have advantages over those surveyed in the previous chapters, and to be consistent with the theories advanced there. First, it begins with performances as a way toward deciding when, and what, musical work might be on the scene. It better fits, I will claim, our intuitions about musical works and their performances insofar as they are made manifest in the discourses surrounding improvised music.1 In particular, it fits with what many improvisers report they are doing both when improvising while performing a work (say, “My Favorite Things”) and producing free improvisations. It is also (and this is, I think, a great benefit) neutral with respect to the actual ontological status of the work itself. The only condition will be that musical works are things that can be represented (and so, as we shall see, are things with respect to which a performance can suffer failures of fidelity). Once this condition is met, one can have any or no further commitments as to what musical works in fact are. This account is even compatible with many versions of fictionalism, which has it that musical works do not actually exist, only that we treat them as if they do.2 It will also 1.  Having questioned the role of intuitions in many accounts of the status of musical works and performances, I will need to be very careful in explaining where, when, and why I invoke an appeal to intuitions. 2.  It is compatible, at least, with those versions of fictionalism that allow fictional entities to be represented, as with paintings of unicorns.

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be shown to emerge out of the Afrological aesthetics so far developed, and indeed almost to be necessitated by it. Let us take these conditions in turn. The kinds of improvisations I want to address first are those that are normally viewed as improvised performances of preexisting works, such as performances of “My Favorite Things,” or my graphic score found earlier in Chapter One. After we have developed a theory for such performances, we will return to the question of free improvisations and work-­creating performances.3 At the greatest level of generality, I claim that improvisations are performances of preexisting works when they are representations of the preexisting work, and are therefore open to failures of fidelity. The conditions under which a given performance is a representation of a preexisting work will be grounded epistemically; when a given performance evinces an improviser’s understanding of the work, it is best seen as a representation of it. All this, of course, needs to be unpacked further. What do I mean by claiming that improvised performances can be representations? The term “representation” is used in many ways, in many subfields of philosophy, to the degree that some think it is almost a term devoid of meaning.4 Just as in the visual arts, a given painting may be a representation of the Duke of Wellington, so a given performance can be a representation of “My Favorite Things.”5 While visual representations are often glossed as presenting to viewers some aspect of how that which they represent looks, so performances present to hearers some aspect of how that which they represent sounds, which we will see can be fruitfully considered as paraphrases of the sound of that being represented.6 And just as with visual representa3.  One should not assume that these categories are exclusive. We may discover that both highly improvisational performances of preexisting works, and free improvisations, can be work-­creating performances. 4.  We will see that this is actually a benefit of the “performance as representation” model, since the plasticity built into the notion of being a representation will mirror the plasticity of what sorts of things musical works themselves might be insofar as they are the object of performances as representations. There are many ways one might represent a musical work, many senses in which a given performance may be such a representation. 5.  See Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, for a detailed model of the representational nature of tonal music grounded in both a philosophical account of the status of species and a neurological account of the mental processes involved in musical perception and comprehension. For my purposes it is important that Nussbaum offers an independent argument for the conclusion that music can be representational. 6.  “Looks” and “sounds” here are not intended to endorse a particular realist conception of the visual and auditory properties of that being represented, but are, in effect, shorthand for “looks according to the artist,” and “sounds like according to the performer.”

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tions there are many ways one might actualize such a representation, so too with auditory representations.7 Those familiar with the literature concerning whether music can be representational may be taken aback by my claim, to be argued for below, that musical performances can be representations of the musical work they are performances of. For the question of the status of music as a representational art normally looks elsewhere to find a sense in which music may be representational. The standard question is whether music can represent an object (say, the sea, or a steam engine), or whether the expressiveness of music is best seen as presenting us with a representation of the emotions being expressed. These are important questions, and various answers are given to them (although “no” is the dominant position).8 Yet when delving into these debates one would be excused if one were to be very uncertain about what it is that is being said to either be, or not be able to be, representational. It is usually said to be music, or a work of music. In other words, this debate is driven by an emphasis on musical works as entities concerning which these questions can be fruitfully and coherently asked. The issue is whether musical works can represent, but the details of these debates often slip into talking of performances, of sounds and what they sound like. The question, for example, of whether Debussy’s “La Cathédrale Engloutie” can represent the tolling of church bells rests, partially, on whether the piano in performance sounds like church bells. What I want to consider is whether a performance can be a representation of what it is a performance of—­I am worried about the representational status of performances, not musical works, and if the latter question is sometime elided into the former, so much the worse for the clarity of these debates. In other words, if you start with a standard ontology of music that begins with musical works as your focus, asking both what a musical work might represent and how it may so represent raises serious puzzles, at least on the face of it. For musical works, given the role they are intended to play, simply do not seem to be the right sort of things to represent. Yet if you start with a concern for performances and ask this same question, it becomes immediately apparent that here is where a concern for musical works, and a role for them, slots in. For on the face of it, performances, if they are to repre7.  One asymmetry here is the fact that with “standard” visual representations, such as portrait painting, what is being represented pictorially can literally also be perceived visually, while it is an open question as to whether musical works can be literally heard. This asymmetry may dissolve away if you think one can visually represent a fictional entity, say, a unicorn. 8.  For a clear summary of these debates see Chapter Two of Ridley’s The Philosophy of Music.

My Favorite Things  • 217

sent anything, represent the work they are the performance of.9 Moreover, a number of the standard objections to music’s representational character dissolve when asking about whether musical performances can represent the work they are performances of.10 Again, by operating within an Afrological perspective that foregrounds performances and intentions, discovering the representational nature of performances will be shown not to be a stretch, and to in fact be an essential part of the performance/work relationship. Before developing this theory in some detail, I want to address a potentially important criticism of this whole project. One may detect a tension inherent in arguing that a representational theory of improvised performance is suggested by Afrological aesthetics and practices, given the pointed and necessary critique that representation has received from critical race theorists. In a nutshell, if representation has been used as a colonial tool to reinforce white hegemony and perpetuate racist oppression via the use of demeaning representations of black bodies—­if representation is in this sense another form of control of black bodies by white rulers—­what value or truth could there be in advocating a distinctly black representational practice in the case of musical performance? If representation has been and continues to be a tool of oppression, is not representation to be avoided and alternatives to it theorized and employed? Such an argument is, of course, appealing in many ways. In particular, recognizing that words and concepts have powerful holds on our imagination, and so on our practices, may be reason enough for some to eliminate their own critical and creative practices from descriptions involving representational acts; perhaps sometimes “merely” finding an alternative word or description is not a minor change. Yet there can be, I think, a way to hold on to representation as a description of Afrological musical practices that at the same time recognizes the pernicious history of the term and the practice, and that itself is suggested by assorted race theorists’ theorizing concerning representation. For example, bell hooks, in her book focusing on this very ques  9.  This would be akin to the representational character of photography, according to those who accept the photographic transparency thesis, which has it that we see things via or through photographs and films. I thank David Collins for bringing this to my attention. 10.  In particular, the criteria for grounding music’s representational nature, which many think music cannot satisfy (either some of them or perhaps all of them), are easily satisfied, I think, by performances with respect to what they are performances of. Alternatively, I agree with Ridley’s critique of the arguments by Scruton and S. Davies to the effect that music cannot satisfy these criteria (Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 49).

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tion, Black Looks: Race and Representation, does not so much ask us generally, or blacks and black artists more specifically, to avoid representational practices as much as reform them.11 She states: “Clearly, those of us committed to black liberation struggle, to the freedom and self-­determination of all black people, must face daily the tragic reality that we have collectively made few, if any, revolutionary interventions in the area of race and representation.”12 Here hooks seems to view the problem with representation as not inherent in the practice or theory itself, as much as in the sordid history of its use. She goes on to state, as many others agree, that “there is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in this society and the institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all black people. . . . Control over images is central to the maintenance of any system of racial domination” (my emphasis).13 A number of points can be extracted from these and similar passages from critical race theorists. First, and most obviously, the history of the use of representation as a tool of oppression is most centrally, if not exclusively, theorized as concerning visual representations—­that is, images. In this sense, it concerns not representation per se, but a subset of representations. The fact that representations are often taken to be either equivalent to visual representations or exhausted by them can explain why one might object to representation per se, if one objects to visual representations. But stronger still, it is not representation per se that is objected to (even if this is equated with visual representations), but representations of black subjects, and such representations made in certain ways for certain purposes. hooks challenges blacks to reclaim representation, to make a radical intervention into its use and history, to take control over the images of black bodies, to create a revolutionary mode of pictorial representation. If we broaden the scope of representation to cover musical performances, we can generate the following claim in sympathy with hooks: Control over performances is central to the maintenance of any system of racial domination. And is this not what we have seen, that copyright regimes that ignore Afrological musical practices end up downgrading their artistic value, contributing to ongoing racial domination? That denying that Coltrane and others “knew what they were doing,” that they were in effect ignorant or mad (or both!), 11. hooks, Black Looks, 2–­3. 12. hooks, Black Looks, 1–­2. 13. hooks, Black Looks, 2.

My Favorite Things  • 219

that they could not even manage to perform “My Favorite Things” when they seemed to try to, is part and parcel of racist attempts to deny creative autonomy to black bodies? The preceding chapter discussed the many ways the AACM sought to reclaim control over their performances, the discourses surrounding them, and the manner in which black music, and black people, were represented.14 Against this backdrop I suggest that a representational theory of improvised work performance should be seen as perhaps the most historically long-­lasting and effective way in which black creativity has fought for control over representations and has insisted that Afrological creative practices can be developed contrary to white-­dominated practices, which prioritize a particular mode of representation (here, musical representation), a mode that historically prioritizes the re-­inscription of white male dominance over art via the figure of the composer. Viewing improvised performances as representations of what they are performances of, which foreground individual subjectivity, creativity, autonomy, and understanding is, so I claim, a powerful and exemplary way of wresting control of representation from the colonizer by the colonized. To recognize that there already is, and that there has been for a long time, an Afrological creative practice that is both representational and liberatory is to recognize the potential for the translation of such a practice into other creative and political spheres. With this in mind, have we not perhaps discovered an impetus behind the constant reference to the improvisatory as a characteristic of black rearticulations of representation in black visual art practices, and as a trope for political organization and action? When, say, Romare Bearden reimagines Homeric heroes (the historical source of white slave owners and conquerors) as African-­inspired totems, let alone his paintings of jazz quartets, or when Jean-­Michel Basquiat employs the word “jazz” and “Charlie Parker” in large-­scale paintings both referencing and critiquing white histories of the visual representation of black bodies, is not improvisation being used to challenge and assert an alternative model of representation? Thus, I see some value, both philosophical and political (to the degree these two can be cleaved from each other when considering matters such as these), in using “representation,” but I understand and sympathize with those who may feel so oppressed by the concept that they would rather leave it to the dust-­heap of history. If they 14.  Indeed, control of performances as an antiracist gambit is an essential part of the political/aesthetic practices of vanguardist black improvisers such as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and the artists associated with both the October Revolution and the Jazz Composers Guild.

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see any value in the precise unpacking of the theory that follows, I hope both that another term to describe it might be at hand, and that it itself neither suggests a history of oppression nor misleads in other ways.15 An important difference between the representational account to be developed and those type/token theories commonly advocated by ontologists of music is that what counts as a representation, while not wholly independent of what is being represented and its properties, is largely determined by artistic vision, intention, and the history of representations for a given community.16 For example, it is a given that there are Romanesque, baroque, mannerist, cubist, fauvist, pointillist, impressionist, futurist, surrealist, constructivist, and abstract expressionist (to name but a few) manners in which a given subject might be visually represented, and that the subject itself lays down very few, if any, norms for its representation. More specifically, neither which properties of a subject being represented need to be represented, nor the manner in which any given property needs to be represented, is determined by the subject of representation. Unlike Platonist proposals of musical work/ performance, where the work itself largely (perhaps totally) determines its instance class, a representational theory of performance does not require that the object being represented play such a strong normative role. This is one reason why a representational account is well suited to make sense of improvised performances of musical works, for it can make sense of the variety of ways in which a musical work may be improvised on, and the seeming fact 15.  There is a further, more technical, reason why the theory of improvisatory representation I develop does not fall prey to the critique of representation developed by critical race theorists. This is the fact that both music as performed, and as encoded in musical works, is often opaque as to its extramusical meaning. With most pictorial representations, to establish that you are faced with a representation of “X” is to determine to a great extent the semantic content of the representation. Yet sounds are far more unruly, so to speak, as to their semantic content, and so the work of establishing the meaning of any performed music is not discharged simply by establishing what it is a performance of—­the opacity of the meaning is still present. Organizations such as Ultra-­red, committed to the political liberatory potential of music in particular and sound art more generally, work with this opacity of meaning in their sound art and play with the fluid representational nature of sound. 16.  It has been argued that this is true even with seemingly more “well-­behaved” type-­ token theory. It has proven to be very difficult to lay down conditions for what a type is, what a token is, and when a token is a token of a given type, that do not reduce to some sort of “community acceptance” model. See Szabó, “Expressions and Their Representations” and Wetzel, “Types and Tokens.” Szabó, as will be discussed below, develops a representational theory to account for the relationship of word tokens to word types, often taken to be the paradigmatic case of a type/token ontology.

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that these ways may have little, if anything, sonically in common (since they may be representing different features of the work and/or representing the same features in perhaps radically different ways).17 By moving the burden from the musical work itself to performers’ intentions in establishing when a performance is a representation, and so in fact is a performance, the theory we are developing is in keeping with the intentionalism that we have argued is so crucial to Afrological aesthetics. Yet even given this advantage, we still need an account of what it means for a performance to be a representation of a musical work. Can performances be representations on any one account of representation (one of the many) that are employed in philosophical discourses? It is generally thought that a representation must have certain semantic properties. There is much disagreement concerning which properties, how many, and in what sense representations must have them. Examples of such semantic properties are content, reference, and truth conditions, among others. In other words, if a musical performance is to be considered to be a representation of a musical work, then the performance must have features such as these. It seems fairly straightforward to claim that a performance can have such semantic properties—­it can refer to the musical work it is a performance of, it can have as its content the content or properties it represents the musical work as having (it represents the given work as having certain properties—­as being sad, for example), and we might even see sense in claiming that a given performance might represent truthfully or falsely the work it is a performance of.18 I will take it as nonproblematic that performances, in principle, can satisfy what 17.  Given any object of visual representation, it is impossible to parse all visual images into those that are representations of this object and those that are not, based solely on perceived features of this object. This is also true, I believe, of performances as representations of musical works. Unlike Goodman’s account of musical works and performances, where the musical work exhaustively and unambiguously parses all performances into those of the work and those not of the work, no such neatness follows from the representational account, nor is such neatness desirable. Goodman worries that anything less then complete determination of the performance class of a given work by the work might allow a performance sounding like “Three Blind Mice” to be a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. When focusing on improvised performances of musical works and the cultural communities that such performances exist in, such a possibility is not to be avoided but to be explained as real. Curiously, Goodman’s own motivation behind his account of scores as symbol systems is to differentiate them from representations, for he believed, perhaps without much articulated motivation, that anything can be a representation of anything. For a good discussion of this see Lopes, Understanding Pictures. 18.  Critical discourse concerning performances is rife with the language of truthfulness.

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many see as these necessary conditions for being representations. In fact, many have argued that collectively improvised Afrological performances are rich with these three species of semantic content as a result of their dialogicality and their role in mediating personal histories and narratives, and also as a site for identity construction, negotiation, and contestation.19 More narrowly concerning representational art, philosophers of art often distinguish three features that visual representations, say paintings, may have: 1. What is represented. 2. The means by which the representation represents. 3. How the subject represented is represented.20 Performances can also nonproblematically have these features of representations. A performance of “My Favorite Things” (1) represents “My Favorite Things,” (2) by means of producing certain sounds in sequence, and may (3) represent it as haunting, morally ambiguous, and brooding, for example.21 19.  Perhaps the fullest account of such semantic contents is found in Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something, while more generally is it assumed that such content exists in much of the contemporary literature concerning collective improvisation. 20.  The reader is invited to consider the related list of criteria that Ridley presents to see how easy it is to satisfy them when considering performances as representations of works (The Philosophy of Music, 49). The Intention condition is met whenever a performer intends to perform a given work. The Medium/Content Distinction condition is met by any theory that has it that musical works are not actual sounds, are not themselves performances. The Conventions condition is met by the fact that how one actualizes or performs a given work is clearly the product of conventions, conventions of score reading, genre, and so on. The Thoughts criterion is met by the fact that, say, a languid performance of “My Favorite Things” is expressing the thought that “My Favorite Things” is, or can be, languid. The Resemblance between perceptual experiences is satisfied by all those who think that our access to how musical works sound is via hearing them performed; the resemblance is perfect, for the perception of a musical performance—­that is, hearing it—­just is hearing the musical work it is a performance of. 21.  Of course there may be great debate and disagreement as to how a given representation is representing its subject—­does the Mona Lisa represent its subject as enigmatic? It is worth noting that I am here assuming, for the sake of argument, a minimalist account of the representational features of musical performances. That is to say, the subject of the representations is the work itself and not some extramusical subject (such as personal histories or emotions). While I do believe musical performances, particularly improvised performances, can have such representational contents, the theory here being developed does not require such contents for its plausibility.

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The model I am developing has it that a work is performed when an improviser or improvisers manifest their understanding of the work by presenting an auditory representation of it via performance. I take this to be parallel to cases of pictorial representation. Just as we know that a correct theory of pictorial representation must have it that paintings of Gertrude Stein must count as representational regardless of the genre of painting they are examples of (and so, regardless of the pictorial means by which they represent Gertrude Stein), so too can aural/musical representations of musical works vary greatly in their auditory features. Just as visual representations need not be realist as with (a perhaps naïve understanding of ) photography, performances as sonic representations of musical works need not sound like any of the variety of ways that a performance would sound were it to literally follow the score of the work.22 If we are to start with performances, how do we know what counts as a performance that is a representation? If representations, visual or auditory, of a given subject can vary greatly one from another, how can we decide when we are actually faced with a representation of a given subject? What anchors, so to speak, a representation of “X” as a representation of “X,” and not of something else, or of nothing at all? Has the generality of the conditions of being a representation that we have laid down left us with no way of telling whether something is a representation, if in fact it is possible to make that determination? There needs to be some constraints that establish when representation is in fact achieved.23 In general, two interrelated constraints are similar to those that have been adduced to account for the representational status of artworks generally and, more broadly still, artifacts. What counts as a representation, be it pictorial or musical, is, I believe, determined by artist/performer intent, and/or the representational conventions of an art/music consuming community. Again, looking to individual intentions and community standards is in keeping with the ontology suggested by Afrological aesthetics. Different communities at different times will see or hear something as being representational, and individual performers/artists intend, or not, to present sonic 22.  There is no agreement concerning by virtue of what characteristics all tokens of the letter “A” are just that, and such a case is seemingly far more straightforward than that of pictorial or musical representation. 23.  As a matter of fact, the title of a painting is often the main means by which we have access to the painting’s precise status as a representation. Similarly, a song title, or announcement at a performance, may be the main means we have of identifying a performance as a performance of, and so a representation of, a given musical work.

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(or visual) representations, as the case may be. Of course, there may well be certain universal limits as to what can count as a representation, based on the structure and limitations of our sense organs, or on what in the end a correct account of mental representation looks like. Moving to some sort of “community standards” account of representation need not have it that anything at all can be representational. For there are always reasons why an individual or community takes a given visual image to be representational, or a given performance of a musical work to be just that.24 Often these reasons will be highly indexed to a history of representation for a given art genre and community, or perhaps will be far more “micro” than that (they may reduce to the quixotic perceptual beliefs of a given artist and her influence on a community of art consumers, which itself may be the product of chance events). The reasons may have much to do with an individual artist’s changing sense of what things look and sound like, and of what the best way is to transmit this information via pictorial or musical means. A community standards test is not, therefore, some sort of radical free-­ floating relativism of the “anything goes” type that analytic philosophers love to hate. Communities see or hear things as representations for reasons. However, there may be some conditions that need to govern even a community’s beliefs concerning representations—­there can be cases when a community is simply wrong that a given performance is, say, a representation of “My Favorite Things.” There must be a causal/intentional link between a given performance-­as-­representation and the work the performance is of, that is, what work the performance is evidence of one’s understanding of. For Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” to be that, the understanding he manifests during these performances must causally link up ultimately with the original score or performance of the work. What he is representing, what he is evincing understanding of, must “go back” to the original creation of the work by its composer.25 There may well be many intermediate stages, and he need not himself have seen the score or have been present at its creation, but for his understanding of “My Favorite Things” to be evinced 24.  Perhaps, as with Goodman, almost any sound could be a representation of almost any work if there are principled reasons why a given individual in a given community hears it as such. But this does not entail Goodman’s fear that for a late-­twentieth-­century classical music audience in Boston, a performance that sounds like “Three Blind Mice” may be taken to be a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. 25.  As we shall see, there is a sense in which the original fixation of musical works via score creation can itself be seen as the creation of a representation, since scores are often best seen as graphic representations of mentally conceived sound structures.

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by his performance as a representation of “My Favorite Things” (as opposed to an understanding he mistakenly takes to be of “My Favorite Things”), it must stand in a chain of representations going back to the ur-­representation. Otherwise his performance will be a representation of something else; he can be mistaken about what he is representing, just as a visual artist may be. So, he must intend to represent something that is itself causally linked to the given work’s creation.26 This condition establishes that claims to represent some particular X are in fact linked to X and not some distinct object Y. In addition there needs to be a sort of counterfactual dependence between the properties of a given work and the properties an improviser represents the work as having via performance. If, say, the melody of “My Favorite Things” as scored were to be totally different than it is, then Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” may have sounded different than they do.27 Of course not all changes in the work as scored need to result in changes in representations of the work. But a performance will fail to be a performance of a given work, will fail to represent it, if no change in the original work would result in a change in the performance. Representations need, in this sense, to be sensitive to changes in the properties of that which they are representing.28 If the properties of X were to make no difference at all to someone represent26.  The counterexamples here are rather far-­fetched, but that is the point, for the limitations on representations should be very few indeed, allowing for a very wide class of representations of a given subject. For example, someone might take themselves to be producing a pictorial representation of Westminster Abby, but in fact be in front of, and painting, Westminster Cathedral. Similarly, one might think one is performing “My Favorite Things,” but simply be mistaken about what song one is performing (you have never seen the play or movie, and someone slips you the sheet music to “Climb Every Mountain,” mischievously mistitled as “My Favorite Things”). 27.  Note that this particular example need not be correct as a matter of “counterfactual history,” since how Coltrane is representing “My Favorite Things” need not be sensitive to the melody of “My Favorite Things” as scored. The visual analogy is this—­if you are in fact in front of Westminster Abbey, and claim to be painting a representation of it, but regardless of what is in front of you, you paint the same image, then there is no real content to your claim to be painting Westminster Abbey as opposed to a representation of something else, or not a representation at all. 28.  To flesh out fully this point would require a bit more care. The performance of a given work must be sensitive to changes in the work itself, but via the often complex set of links between the performance and the work. If Coltrane’s performance of “My Favorite Things” was causally grounded in his hearing of the original cast recording, then it must be sensitive to changes in this, as opposed to the sheet music. A performance as representation must be counterfactually sensitive to whatever it is that it is most directly representing, which is that which grounds the claim that it is representing a particular musical work.

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ing some X, if changes in what they judge to be the properties of X do not in any way influence how they choose to represent X, then it seems fair to say that they are not actually representing X, they are just saying that they are.29 This test is intended to ground the claim by the artist to, in fact, be representing something, not simply saying so. While that represented does not have anything like the normative force that standard type/token theorists claim the type does, representations of X must be of X, in at least this (weak) counterfactual sense. Those who truthfully claim to be representing X must have it that their representational efforts are determined by what properties they take X to have, and what properties they take X to have must be suitably grounded in X itself, and so sensitive to changes in X.30 Yet such dependence, crucial I think for performances’ status as representations, is not a useful practical test due to its counterfactual nature. In addition, there is no way to know what features of the work correlate with what features of a performance that is representing them. How a given performance might be sensitive to changes in a work’s properties is opaque to us. This is because there is no way to judge a priori what features a given musical work is taken to have by a given performer of the work. Perhaps one foregrounds melody as scored, but perhaps not. And indeed, what one takes the melody to be, and how one chooses to represent it, may vary to such an extent that there is no way to tell how changes in the work as scored, or in its known performance history, might change what a given performer/ improviser takes as the melody they wish to represent. The melody might have a certain feel to a given performer, evoke a certain mood, reflect a certain history, or what have you, which are all legitimate properties of the work that one might choose to represent via performance. One may think of a melody in terms of absolute pitch values, or just intervals, or melodic contours. These are all legitimate ways of evincing understanding of the melody of a work, and so of the work itself, via performance. Coltrane may decide that for him, “My Favorite Things” manifests a superficial bright and breezy mood, but with an undercurrent of melancholy, and this is what he 29.  Such cases need not be disingenuous, but may be more properly seen as commentary on a work, as opposed to representation of it. 30.  Even here one needs to be careful. One can represent something as having a property that one does not, as a matter of fact, think it has (representing Donald Trump as a great intellect, say), but even in such cases, one’s representation is indexed to beliefs one actually has about properties of that being represented. The point of such a representation (Trump as scholar) is indexed to beliefs the artist actually has about Trump, and not about someone else, perhaps someone mistakenly taken to be Trump.

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may choose to represent in performance. He then needs to decide what, for him, is an appropriate way, sonically, to represent this conflicting mood. These two axes of indeterminacy, so to speak—­what a given improviser sees in a given work that they want to represent, and how they choose sonically to effect this representation—­allow for tremendous variation in what improvisations of existing works as representations might sound like. To generalize, a representation of musical work X via a performance/ improvisation must:

1. Issue from an intent to represent X or an intent to represent some Y that stands in an appropriate causal chain with X.31 2. Have the properties of one’s performance representing X or Y (as the case may be) counterfactually dependent on the properties of X or Y such that there exist changes in the properties of X or Y that would result in changes in the properties of the performance.

This representational account seems well suited to explain the variety of ways the improvised performance of a given work might sound without having to legislate how the performances of works must sound. It does not assume that musical works come with changeless properties that must be realized in performance and perhaps realized in a particular way, and it allows for the vast variety of ways in which improvisers perform musical works. To be clear, my claim is that performances that satisfy the above conditions count as representations, on a thin conception of representation, and the sense in which many improvised performances of preexisting works are just that is best captured by taking the performance to be such a representation of the work. We will return to the status of work-­creating performances and free improvisations with respect to their status as representations.

Representation as Paraphrase When improvisers claim to be performing “My Favorite Things” by representing it, what are they doing? To represent something, be it pictorially or 31.  The intent to represent the work may often have as its content the intent to perform the work—­performances as representations need not issue only from those with a representational theory of performance.

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sonically, is, among other things, to manifest your particular understanding of what you are representing. You understand that which you are representing as having certain properties, and you choose to represent it as having them. A given representation is, in this sense, a manifestation of one’s understanding of what is being represented, either in toto or some aspects of what is being represented. The performance of “classical” scored works may also be a manifestation of one’s understanding of the work, but the variety of ways this understanding might be made manifest is severely limited both by the nature of standard notation itself and by the acceptable ways of interpreting this notation in performance. If, as we discussed earlier, one thinks that computers can perform scored works, but do not have any understanding of them, then performance per se need not manifest understanding. Even with human performers, the understanding they manifest of a work via a performance of it can be very thin (with those who can barely read and perform the score) or quite thick, as with those who perform subtle interpretations of works. The fact that traditional scores often determine a very narrow range of proper understandings of the musical work suggests, perhaps rightly, looking to type/token models to explain the relationship between musical works, scores, and performances, for such models endorse the normativity that traditional notation seems to enjoy. Yet once one steps back and realizes that even with this repertoire what performances of works really seem to be most centrally is a manifestation of the performer’s understanding of the work (however thin or thick it may be), then one can see that a representational model makes the most sense, particularly if one is operating in a musical tradition where musical works are not seen as having a very circumscribed class of possible performances each of which is sonically very similar to any other.32 Many improvisations, particularly improvisations based on preexisting musical works, can therefore profitably be seen as manifestations of the 32.  It is not, strictly speaking, a score in and of itself that takes on normative force, but a score as existing in a certain culture of what it means to perform a score. This fact, often occluded by much theory, might make it seem natural to develop a theory of musical works where the work itself lays down norms for its performance. But this is simply not so; it is performance traditions that endorse such norms, coupled with composer intent. See Goher, The Imaginary Museum, on this and related points. More generally, it is difficult to see how a sound structure can establish norms; only an interpretation or use of it can accomplish this, both intentional acts. Also recall, if computers can perform works but lack understanding, then understanding may be a prerequisite of improvising on a work, but not of performing it.

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improviser’s understanding of the works their improvisations are based on. This might now seem trivially true, yet I want to propose a rather precise kind of understanding that such improvisations may be the manifestation of, drawing on suggestions made by Frank Sibley and Aaron Ridley.33 The claim is that many improvised performances of musical works are best seen as representations of the musical work being performed, and so as presenting us with an example of the improviser’s understanding of the work, in such a way that the improvisation can be seen as a paraphrase of the musical work.34 We need to investigate how paraphrase is often a hallmark of understanding, and how it might manifest itself in improvisations. Ridley, taking a cue from Wittgenstein, argues that the understanding of music bears more similarity to the understanding of natural languages than is often allowed. While this does not mean that music is a natural language, or that there are not important differences, for example, between one’s understanding of French and one’s understanding of “Tiger Rag,” the similarities are worth considering. Ridley, following Wittgenstein, takes a hallmark of the understanding of a natural language to be the ability to paraphrase any well-­formed proposition in a given language with another such proposition. This seems to be a crucial test of language understanding, as you must be able to reword what you say in a way that leaves much of the meaning intact, and/or be able to rephrase what others say to you in a similar meaning-­invariant fashion. If I say to you “The cat is on the mat” (that favorite proposition of analytic philosophers), and you cannot paraphrase this with something like “The small feline pet is on the small square fabric,” then you do not understand the proposition. If all you can do is parrot it back, then your understanding is, well, like that of a parrot, wholly absent—­ all you can do is mimic. Others have found this to be too strict a necessary condition for understanding a language, since young children do not yet have full language competence that allows them to paraphrase a given utterance with another, but they still understand the utterances at issue insofar as the utterances are action-­guiding for them in the appropriate way. The ability to paraphrase may then be more of a hallmark of advanced or full understanding of a language, and so the analogy with improvising may be even more fitting, since the ability to improvise on a given musical work 33.  See Sibley, “Making Music Our Own,” and Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, Chapter One. 34.  Below I will suggest that not all improvised performances of work are only paraphrases of them, but that paraphrase must be present, perhaps along with other semantically rich actions, such as commentary or parody.

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seems to require more than a minimal understanding of the work (say, more than just the ability to recognize it), but rather a thick understanding of it. Of course, the meaningful content of the paraphrases may not, and often (always?) will not, match exactly that of the proposition being paraphrased. Not only do individual words have distinct connotations, but words as parts of structured propositions take on meanings wholly indexed to the particular way they are structured within the proposition. And (a point easily missed by philosophers’ tendencies to consider isolated propositions) an utterance is usually a part of a string of utterances, where content strongly colors meaning.35 For banal propositions, for example many commands, the differences in meaning between a given proposition and its paraphrase may be minimal and not matter (“Stop!” vs. “Cease!,” “It is a fine day” vs. “It is lovely outside”),36 yet the more complex the proposition—­and crucially for us, the more the proposition itself may be a plausible object of aesthetic appreciation, being part of a poem or novel—­the more the differences in meaning between paraphrase and original matter. If one does not recognize that paraphrases and originals are not freely substitutable, if one thinks that it doesn’t matter to the meaning, value, and function of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy if one paraphrases it, then again, one would be evincing one’s lack of understanding of the soliloquy, and perhaps of the language it is written in, if not a crucial feature of language per se. Linguistic understanding seems to involve both the ability to paraphrase in a manner that keeps meaning in one sense invariant (a sort of general or generic meaning), and the simultaneous recognition that precise meaning is a function of the particular proposition at hand, and its relationship to the other propositions it is meant to be considered alongside, along with other features such as place and time of utterance. It involves understanding the degree to which paraphrases deviate from the meaning of that being paraphrased: very little with simple commands, a great deal with propositions intended to discharge aesthetic functions, or propositions with literary value. Yet even with literary propositions, some sort of paraphrase is thought to be not only possible, 35.  And, considering the wider contexts in which utterances are made, the social, historical, cultural, and political contexts, we see yet further factors that may well have it that paraphrases and that which they paraphrase may have nonidentical meanings. 36.  Even here context clearly matters. It makes good sense to say “It’s a fine day” if the weather is clement. But to paraphrase this as “It is lovely outside” may not be appropriate if one is sitting in a shack in northern Alberta surrounded by the tar sands. It would be equally odd to substitute “It’s a fine day” for “It is lovely outside” if the day at question is one during which some major disaster has taken place.

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but demanded of one who can rightly claim to understand the proposition. Once one considers the possibility that the ability to paraphrase music might be constitutive of musical understanding, it becomes readily apparent that this is how we precritically think of musical understanding. For often we demand of someone, if we are to judge that they understand a piece of music, their ability to “hum a few bars,” whistle the tune, or the like. Of course such hummings and whistlings are but paraphrases of the work’s melody, as they will rarely match it exactly and are often simplifications of complex multivoiced melodies. They are like Reader’s Digest versions of a work, perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous form of paraphrase. Paraphrase, like the Reader’s Digest, also requires one to decide what is important, and what is less important, about that which you are paraphrasing. And this too seems an essential part of musical understanding (as Ridley argues for convincingly). If, for example, one does not realize that, with much popular dance music, the beat or hook is crucial, and so one thinks they are interchangeable, then one does not understand either the genre or the individual work in question. If one does not hum or sing the hook when asked how the work goes, or worse still, hums the hook of a different song (thinking that all hooks are functionally the same as each other), then one’s understanding of the work will be rightly questioned. Now paraphrase comes in degrees and types, and one may engage in the paraphrase of someone else’s utterance or of one’s own. We may attempt to capture the meaning of someone else’s meaning-­laden utterance, or we may attempt to restate something we have stated previously ourselves. The degree to which a paraphrase may formally differ from that which it is paraphrasing is to a great extent a function of how complex, how meaning-­laden, and how ambiguous that which is being paraphrased is. When paraphrasing utterances that themselves aspire to be art objects, the paraphrase may well differ greatly from what is paraphrased. A paraphrase of a Pound canto or a sonnet of Shakespeare will diverge greatly from the canto or sonnet. The words employed will differ, the lengths may vary greatly (one might write a book attempting to capture the meaning of a short sonnet), and of course the paraphrase will be no substitute for the sonnet or canto. No one would ever claim, “Forget about reading the sonnet, Professor so-­and-­so’s book on it will do just as well,” at the risk of failing to realize that insofar as the sonnet is an art object, its nonparaphrasable content is crucial.37 The precise man37.  One can also have a paraphrase that itself aspires to be an art object, which is a paraphrase either of something that is not an art object (the Iliad as a paraphrase of a common

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ner in which a given art object displays its meaning is an ineliminable and unsubstitutable aspect of it insofar as it is an art object.38 Self-­paraphrase “may involve someone stating a point he has stated before, but now from a quite different perspective,” as Ridley tells us.39 In this sense not only will the form differ but the content itself, the meaning, may well differ, since if you present a point “from a quite different perspective” the allusions, affinities, entailments, and other highly context-­dependent features of the locution will be altered. Repeated paraphrases of the same locution, each from a different, and perhaps changing, perspective, may come to diverge radically from that ur-­locution that they are all paraphrases of.40 Such “sayings again” from different perspectives also suggest models of the relationship of performance to work, where the different perspectives may perhaps represent distinct genre positions, each being a modification of one’s understanding of a musical work, or a series of performances, each perhaps differing considerably from each other, of the same work. I want now to explore the possibility that a way to consider improvised performances of works is as a form of paraphrase, and as such involve viewing improvisations as a mark of the improviser’s musical understanding of the work being improvised on. The act of representing a musical work via an improvised performance of it can be fruitfully seen as a way one evinces one’s understanding of the work via the production of a representation as paraphrase. But again, such a view is perhaps at odds with a common view concerning artworks and paraphrase, a view endorsed to varying degrees by both Wittgenstein and Ridley, among others. The common view has it that perhaps the distinctive feature of artworks is that they are unparaphrasable—­ that paraphrases of artworks do not capture, or cannot be equivalent to, one’s understanding of an artwork insofar as it is an artwork, that is, an object with aesthetic values and properties that cannot be freely substituted oral history) or of a distinct art object. Many jazz performances will be shown to be fruitfully viewed both as art objects and as paraphrases of distinct art objects. 38.  This discussion is couched against a backdrop of discourses that have not eliminated the art object from their purview. If one is operating within an ontology that still recognizes art objects (or their cognates), then it appears that the form such an object takes, and other features of the object that collectively determine its meaning, are ineliminable features of it as being the precise art object it is. Various art movements have not so much questioned the validity of this equivalence as they have questioned the importance or interest of it. 39. Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 26–­27. 40.  The children’s game Telegraph/Broken Telephone garners its interest from the fact that repeated paraphrases often result in something far removed from the source utterance. This is, in effect Goodman’s “Three Blind Mice” worry, which moves him to hypothesize perfect score compliance as a necessary condition for performance.

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with others. To understand an artwork is not to view it as instrumentally substitutable for some other artwork or for some locution that captures it’s meaning via paraphrase. Artworks, so this view has it, are primarily understood “internally,” and although one’s ability to paraphrase an artwork is grounded in one’s internal understanding of it, such paraphrase does not capture this internal understanding, and so is not a substitute for it.41 Ridley is well aware that the focus on the internal understanding of artworks tends to mask both the possibility, and perhaps the importance, of external understanding. He tells us that “art, by definition, resists paraphrase; therefore to understand a work of art as a work of art is to understand it internally; therefore no aesthetically pertinent sense can be attached to the notion of external understanding.”42 This is the “common view” that Ridley wants to question. He goes on: “It is certainly true that resistance to paraphrase is a highly significant feature of works of art. . . . But to resist paraphrase is one thing, to repel it altogether is quite another.”43 He considers a paraphrase someone might offer of a poem: I can agree wholeheartedly that the paraphrase misses out or loses everything that made the poem worthwhile, but that is hardly surprising. The paraphrase is not, after all, the poem itself, and to expect it to share anything other than paraphrasable content with the poem, for instance interest or beauty, would be quixotic. . . . In offering to paraphrase the poem, one is not offering to replace it with something just as good, or even with something of the same sort. One is offering merely to express one’s understanding of what the poem says by saying it in a different way.44 (my emphasis) The point is this—­it is not that an ability to paraphrase an artwork is not a hallmark of understanding an artwork, it is just that the paraphrase is not itself a substitute for the artwork. To be faced with a paraphrase of an artwork 41.  The thought is that artworks, which do not function as means to bring about certain actions or behaviors, are not freely substitutable for other things. But of course artworks are instrumentally for something—­even if it is bringing about a particular mental/emotional/sensory state or set of states. And surely it requires argument that nothing can yield such a state, or a sufficiently similar one, but the art object in question. One needs an argument that gets a stronger conclusion than the truism that paraphrases are not the same as what they paraphrase to yield the impossibility of paraphrasing artworks in the requisite strong sense. 42. Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 34. 43. Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 34. 44. Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 34.

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is not “just as good as” being faced with the artwork itself. But we need to be careful to avoid a possible equivocation concerning “just as good as.” The sense in which a paraphrase is not as good as what it is a paraphrase of is that a paraphrase will not have the very same aesthetic, cognitive, and affective functions as the work it is a paraphrase of. In this sense, it is other than the artwork it is a paraphrase of. To experience the artwork itself and a paraphrase of it is to have two distinct experiences, and experiences that differ in ways that speak to why you wish to experience art in the first place. Their aesthetic, affective, and phenomenal features will vary in significant ways. This does not mean that paraphrases need to be not “just as good as” what they are paraphrases of in the sense that they are aesthetically inferior, that is, inferior as artworks. “Just as good as” is operating in these claims as an identity claim—­a paraphrase and that which it paraphrases are not equivalent as art objects—­but not as an aesthetic judgment. I want to claim that improvisations of the sort Coltrane undertook of “My Favorite Things,” and in general improvisations characteristic of jazz and related improvisational Afrological musical traditions, can be seen as accomplishing both what Ridley thinks paraphrases do accomplish, that is, expressing one’s understanding of what is being paraphrased, and what Ridley, following others, claim paraphrases do not generally accomplish.45 For when Ridley claims that, “In offering to paraphrase the poem, one is not offering to replace it with something just as good, or even with something of the same sort,” he has moved to an evaluative/aesthetic use of “as good as.” While paraphrases in general may not intend such an aesthetic equivalence, it would take argument to show that they cannot have such aesthetic value—­that is, cannot be “as good [aesthetically] as” that which they paraphrase even if they necessarily differ from that which they paraphrase. For Coltrane’s improvisations on “My Favorite Things” have the following features; they:

1. Evince Coltrane’s understanding of “My Favorite Things” the musical work.

45. Nothing about Ridley’s account entails that he must be unsympathetic with this account of improvisation. The account I will now sketch, which sees improvisation as a form of paraphrase of that which resists paraphrase, is in sympathy with those theorists who see in black artistic practices a paradigmatic case of resistance in various forms. To attempt that which there is much resistance against is to engage in a practice that can be seen as exemplary of liberation struggles, in the manner that Fanon has elegantly theorized. Indeed, to turn common Tin Pan Alley tunes into extended improvisational fancies can be seen as an aesthetic tour-­de-­force from this perspective.

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2. Serve as paraphrases of “My Favorite Things” the musical work. 3. Demonstrate that jazz standards positively invite, while perhaps still resisting, paraphrase. 4. Have aesthetic properties suitably related to, and as valuable as (if not more valuable than) the work “My Favorite Things” itself. 5. Can in this sense be “replacements just as good” as that which they are paraphrasing (perhaps even of greater aesthetic value), while of course not being equivalent to them.

By representing “My Favorite Things” via a paraphrase of it, Coltrane demonstrates not just his external understanding of “My Favorite Things” but also his internal understanding of it, since his performance, insofar as it is itself redolent with aesthetic value, recognizes that “My Favorite Things,” as an artwork, requires in effect an artistic gesture in response in order to note its internal meaning. The meaning of “My Favorite Things” is not the same as that of any other artwork, but an improvised performance of it can represent its meaning via paraphrase, which itself has aesthetic value, and value other than (but perhaps related to) that of “My Favorite Things” itself. Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” have their own internal meaning related to, yet distinct from, that of “My Favorite Things” the ur-­ work. To paraphrase an artwork via the production of a distinct, yet related, artwork is to note the importance and unsubstitutability of the internal meaning of artworks. You are not offering up the improvisation as a substitute for the work, or for anyone else’s improvisation on it.46 The first two claims stand together. There is a rather straightforward sense in which any performance of a musical work is the manifestation of the performer’s understanding of the work. You understand it to “go like this” (or, more specifically, that it can go “like this”), and if your performance is judged to be just this, to succeed as a performance, then you have successfully evinced to others your understanding of the work.47 Yet with 46.  Such aesthetically rich paraphrases, which have internal meanings distinct from what they are a paraphrase of, can place these meanings in dialogue with each other, as with aesthetically thick works discussed earlier. Perhaps “mundane” performances of preexisting musical works really just manifest an external understanding of the work being performed, and in this sense do not engender any investigation of the possible internal meanings of the work, or open up new performative possibilities as with the modal model. 47.  Strictly speaking you may not have evinced to others your precise understanding of the work (they may fail to glean this), but their judgment that you have performed the work does entail that you have convinced them that you do have an understanding of the work.

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improvised performances one might think that a question is being begged here since many may deny that, say, Coltrane did perform “My Favorite Things” even on occasions when he intended to. However, as we have seen, this is to presuppose an ontology of musical works and their performances that is simply at odds with practice; it is to endorse an ontology of music that fails to accomplish what we wish it to—­to explain why what we take performances of works to be are just that. The best way to ground Coltrane’s claim to be performing “My Favorite Things” is to view his performances of it as representations-­cum-­paraphrases of “My Favorite Things” as embedded within his own performance history of the work, and the performance history of others. Coltrane is offering us his understanding of “My Favorite Things” via his representation as he performs it, and this understanding may, and indeed will, change with time. For paraphrase begets paraphrase, since ways of representing are varied and subject to change and discovery. Coltrane’s intent to perform “My Favorite Things” via an improvisation based on it is discharged by his representing what he takes “My Favorite Things” to be via an improvised performance that is a paraphrase of “My Favorite Things.” What are we to make, then, of the fact that many at the time failed to be convinced that Coltrane had performed “My Favorite Things,” appealing to how the work as scored should sound? Here the situation is again akin to that which many visual artists have faced when developing new means of pictorial representation. If many could not “see” Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s famous 1905–­06 portrait of her, they were in effect denying that his portrait represented Stein, and so denying either that Picasso’s understanding of Stein was accurately captured by this portrait or that his understanding was itself flawed—­that he failed to understand her. With the passage of time we now have no trouble accepting this as a pictorial representation of Stein, indeed as a masterpiece of the portraiture tradition. Similarly with Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things”—­at the time, some were incredulous concerning their status as performances of “My Favorite Things,” but now they stand as masterpieces of the performance of standards from within the jazz tradition. We can now hear “My Favorite Things” in his performances since we now can understand how his performances can be heard as paraphrases of “My Favorite Things,” and as evincing a deep understanding of the work.48 48.  With both the Gertrude Stein portrait and Coltrane performances of “My Favorite Things,” the force of their ability to reconfigure the possible by enacting it is very strong. For

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A related reason why many may have questioned whether Coltrane performed “My Favorite Things” is grounded in a simplistic, yet false, model of how paraphrase is related to meaning. For we tend to gloss musical understanding, or knowledge of a tune, with an ability to pick out and reproduce, by humming, say, important structural features of the tune (the hook, or the primary melody). But such tests of musical understanding are just that, gross tests to indicate if one is familiar with the given tune. It is only if you think that musical understanding is somehow exhausted by this, or that every instance of musical understanding must involve this, that you might think that a performance that does not reference the main melody of “My Favorite Things” therefore fails to be a performance of “My Favorite Things.” Coltrane’s complex, aesthetically rich paraphrases of “My Favorite Things” may not make manifest his full understanding of the work as scored, but do nonetheless reveal his nuanced and deep internal understanding of “My Favorite Things.” Others may have also concluded that Coltrane could not play the melody (and in that sense did not understand it), and so could not be evincing his understanding of “My Favorite Things” by other means, since he lacked the necessary ability to have such understanding in the first place, that is, an ability to play the melody as scored. It is this later claim, as absurd as it is, that both bothered Coltrane and seems to be behind the accusation that he “did not know what he was doing.” In this sense the claim just made above, that in general the ability to perform a work indicates one’s understanding of it, needs to be modified. It is due to the fact that virtually all scores require a performer to go beyond what the notation indicates to produce the work in performance, that understanding is evinced via performance. But such score-­compliant performances are not paraphrase and do not need not involve paraphrase.49 Coltrane’s lengthier and lengthier performances of “My Favorite Things” are statements of his developing understanding of “My Favorite Things.” They are, as Ridley puts it, examples of paraphrase where one returns to a point in a different way. Our ability to hear them as performances of “My Favorite Things” allows his more expansive later performances to be seen as being more sophisticated and better evidence of Coltrane’s understanding of “My Favorite Things” than his more score-­compliant performances. If you ask we now have no problem immediately seeing Stein in the portrait, or hearing “My Favorite Things” in a Coltrane performance. We do not infer or deliberate about this, we directly see and hear it. 49.  Not all score-­compliant performances need to be just filling in the blanks. They can also involve paraphrase and, for that matter, improvisation.

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someone to evince their understanding of a poem and they can only produce a simple facile one-­sentence paraphrase of its surface meaning, you may well think they have a kind of rudimentary understanding of the poem: “boy and girl fall in love, they both die, it is tragic.”50 Equally we would question the depth of their understanding if their paraphrase is simply a slight variation on the poem itself. Yet if they produce a long and complex paraphrase, we think this indicates their greater understanding. (Is this not the basic principle behind how teachers grade student papers?) This suggests something akin to a definition of jazz, or at least a generalization that seems to capture much of its impetus. Jazz confronts the fact that artworks resist paraphrase and turns this resistance into a source of artistic inspiration and practice. It can be seen as another sense in which Afrological art is double-­voiced and often engages in the inversion of meanings—­ for now that which resists paraphrase is paraphrased, again and again. And each example of the paraphrase, each improvised performance, actually re-­ inscribes this resistance by creating an artwork, an improvisation, that itself resists paraphrase. The understanding that a jazz improviser evinces is one that their artistic practice itself resists, and insofar as this understanding is a manifestation of the internal understanding of a musical work, it is by its very nature an understanding that resists understanding.51 We can now see, contra the “common view” that Ridley presents (but does not himself advocate), that there can be an aesthetically pertinent sense attached to the notion of the paraphrase of an artwork, and that the external understanding of an artwork that is demonstrated by an ability to para50.  Indeed we might also find their understanding limited if their paraphrase sticks too closely to the original—­the more score-­compliant the paraphrase is, the more we might wonder if what is being evinced is an understanding of the work or just an ability to read music. 51. The many varied interpretations of standards, the variety of ways a jazz musician will perform her own compositions, the often fluid way jazz works are arranged for assorted ensembles, and, crucially, the role improvisation plays in actualizing works in performance, strongly suggest a model of musical understanding where the ability to paraphrase is the crucial hallmark of such understanding, and a model of performance where manifesting such understanding is prioritized. Jazz performances are often not intended to present an audience with a sound structure that mediates a composer’s intended meaning (that meaning which the score is intended to partially capture), but with the way this meaning is received by the improviser/performers, that is, a representation of this meaning. Improvisations on, for example, melody as scored essentially transform the melody and so its meaning, and are therefore different than the fillings-­in of what the score fails to determine. The fact that texts as literature (art objects) resist paraphrase may be behind Gates’s emphasis on the merely syntactic function of signifyin’, the pure play of signifiers (discussed further below). Yet meaning itself is necessarily changed by paraphrase, and paraphrase can present, modify, comment on, and otherwise shape meaning. This will be discussed further below.

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phrase the artwork can itself be “aesthetically pertinent.” For paraphrase can, contra the standard view, be an example of offering to replace that which one is paraphrasing with something “equally good” and “of the same sort.” Jazz improvisations are rarely just ways “merely to express one’s understanding of what the [musical work] says by saying it in a different way,” as there is nothing “mere” about them. By producing an improvisation that can be seen as both a paraphrase of the work improvised on, and also as having aesthetic value of its own and so demanding an internal understanding of itself, the improviser foregrounds the importance of internal understanding generally, and manifests their internal understanding of the work improvised on.52 We need now to turn our attention to improvisations that are not of a preexisting work. The problem in a nutshell is this: How can improvisations that are not improvisations on a preexisting work be seen as representations, since there does not seem to be anything they can be representations of? Does the theory developed above only account for improvisation of, or on, preexisting musical works? The problem concerns so-­called free improvisations, and improvisations that come to be seen as work-­creating (where these need not be distinct from the class of free improvisations)—­that is, the first performance of a musical work. On the face of it, any performance that is thought of as work-­creating does not have something preexisting “it” that it is either a representation of, or a token of. However, we can ask whether a representation can preexist (or bring into existence) what it represents, just as we can ask whether a token can preexist (or bring into existence) its corresponding type. A closely related question is this: How, if at all, do traditional acts of composition, via either performance or score-­writing, differ from improvisations that also discharge a compositional function by bringing works into existence? And what then of free improvisations? Let us take these in turn.

Composition, Improvisation, and Fallibilism The problem with considering work-­creating performances to be representations only surfaces if what they are representations of is the musical work that they bring into existence, since in such cases the work does not preexist 52.  Another way to generate this conclusion is to stress the point made in Chapter Three that the performance history of a musical work changes the work, including its aesthetically relevant properties, and so its meaning. If this is so then improvised performances as paraphrases of musical works actually modify the internal meaning of the musical work in question, and so are not limited to being simply evidence of external understanding of the work.

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its representation. Two questions now come to the fore—­are we committed to the claim that performances as representations, whether or not they are improvisations, are always representations of an associated musical work? And more generally, need the subject of a representation always preexist its representations? I want to argue that the answer to both questions is no—­and that a plausible theory of what is taken to be a musical work in cases of improvised performance (and, as we shall see, more traditional performances of score-­determined works) requires an enquiry into the precise relationship between a performance as representation and what it represents. More specifically, I argue that when a performance as representation is open to failure with respect to its fidelity to that which it represents, the object of representation plays the role traditionally assigned to that of a musical work and is often identical to what we in fact take the musical work to be, but is not always so. Concerning the question of whether, in general, the subjects of representations need to preexist their representations, there appear to be cases where the answer to this question is no, and so no general criterion of preexistence obtains. First, and of obvious interest to us, is the status of musical works, given Levinson’s view that has it that musical works are indicated sound structures. For Levinson, the indicated sound structure is brought into existence by the act of its indication. Although Levinson does not himself choose to present his theory in this way, indicative acts are acts of representation, usually either graphic representations of the musical work (via score writing) or sonic representations via performance. Acts of indicating a given sound structure are acts of representing this structure either notationally or sonically. Although in these cases the representation that serves as the act of indicating a given sound structure is not preexisted by that which it is a representation of, that is, the musical work, such acts are also at the very same time representations of something that does preexist both the musical work and the indicating act, namely the pure sound structure that is indicated. This Levinson (and most others) conceive of as eternal, and since it is for Levinson not identical with the work, there does still seem to be something that preexists the representation that the representation is a representation of. Stronger still, it is the intentional object of the representation—­for it is often that which a composer is attempting to represent via a compositional act.53 We will return shortly to this point. 53.  I am here following Crane, “Intentional Objects,” in holding that an account of representation is not intended to rid our ontology of intentional objects but actually requires the existence of such objects.

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Blueprints are a second case where we seem to be faced with representations that preexist what they represent. For a blueprint of a building is rather straightforwardly taken to be a graphic representation of the building it is a blueprint of, but the building itself may not yet exist (that’s why you need blueprints!), and may never exist. We might wonder in such cases whether the blueprints are also representations of something that does already exist, perhaps certain spatial structures akin to the eternally existing sound structures in the case of musical works given Levinson’s theory. A third example, according to the philosopher of language Zoltán Gendler Szabó, is the status of the first word tokens of word types.54 He argues that when new words are first coined, the word tokens are best seen as representations of the word type, which itself does not come to exist until the word comes into general usage. If any of these examples convince, then there is no problem, in general, with representations pre-­existing, or existing contemporaneously with, what they represent. So far as this goes, work-­creating improvisations can still be representations. If this is correct, an important question is this: How, if at all, do improvisations that are seen as work-­creating differ from “traditional” work-­creating acts such as score-­writing or composition at, say, the piano? Have we dissolved away all differences between improvisation and composition, and so are we back at the somewhat standard “definition” of improvisation as composition in real time? We need to examine more closely what improvisers actually do while improvising, particularly during improvisations that we might take to be work-­creating, to see whether their activity differs in any significant way from what we take the activity of composition to be in “standard” cases. Are all these activities best seen as acts of representation in the same sense? I want to argue that there is a difference between these two cases, and that this difference has it that musical works may be on the scene at different times and in different ways. The difference has to do with the distinct kinds of representational failures that seem to be possible in the two cases. It is from the perspective of fallibilism that we can distinguish work-­creating improvisations from work creation effected by score-­writing and traditional workings-­out of pieces at, say, the piano. Again, many cases will be mixed, but the distinction will be revealed to be an important one. What can go wrong when representing a musical work symbolically or sonically? Consider first a plausible account of how cases of traditional score-­

54.  See Szabó, “Expressions and Their Representations.”

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writing often proceed.55 A composer has some musical ideas, perhaps hears a melody in her head, and begins to notate it so that this internally heard melody can be actually sounded, and so heard, by others.56 She may be striving for a certain sonic effect between, say, the oboes and flutes, and score their parts accordingly. On having this score first rehearsed or on reading it back to herself (and representing to herself internally what it would sound like were the score to be performed), she may decide that changes are necessary since the notation does not symbolically represent what she is after, perhaps what she hears in her head, or the music produced at a first rehearsal does not sonically represent what she was after.57 Often in rehearsal many changes to the score are necessary, since the score may not work in the intended fashion. On hearing a complex score’s first rehearsal, wholesale changes are often called for. In these senses the score might be mistaken (and this also holds for works created by performance—­the composer sits at the piano and works out the piece, trying assorted chord voicings and the like), it may contain representational failures. This suggests that acts of score-­writing, or acts of composition by performance, are representations of something else, such as a tune heard in the head or some other sort of mental entity.58 For such compositional acts seem to involve consciously comparing the score-­as-­representation with something else, that is, with the subject of the representation. What such score-­writing activities are trying to accomplish is the graphic or sonic representation of features of that which one is trying to represent. These features are taken to already be objectively true of the subject of the representation. One’s graphic representation may, in this sense, get it wrong, as may one’s sonic representation. This suggests a potentially powerful thesis: when there exists an object of musical representation (normally a sound structure or family of sound 55.  The claim need only be that such score-­writing activities may sometimes proceed in this fashion. 56.  I use the notion of “internal hearing” colloquially, and do not intend to endorse any particular account of mental hearing. I also here focus on melody only, but a similar account can be run for other audible features of music. 57.  Alternatively, first hearings of the work as scored may accurately represent what the composer intended, but she may come to modify her intentions, as she may be dissatisfied with her original musical idea. 58.  The fallibilist theory under development here is neutral as to whether that which there can be failures of fidelity with respect to is itself a mental entity, or is that which the mental entity is of or about. That is to say, this theory is neutral as to whether what ends up playing the role of a musical work is itself a mental event or entity of some sort (a version of musical work idealism) or, say, the content of a musical thought that is perhaps an eternally existing sound structure.

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structures) such that a representation of it is judged to be subject to failures of fidelity with respect to it, the object of representation functions as a musical work. Of course, no limitations are at play with respect to what might constitute fidelity to that being represented; that is open to revision, contestation, or puzzlement. What is important is if there is, for some appropriate agent or other (a composer, a performer, an audience member) something that a given sounding is being judged against for its accuracy of representation, that something serves as a musical work, and the performance is taken to be of it (or as having failed to be of it). We shall see shortly how this suggests a distinction between certain improvisations and the sort of work creating acts just discussed.59 But first, some further details. When one is producing a work in the traditional way just described, it may often be very difficult to distinguish the following two ways in which things might go wrong:

1. The sounds produced (or that would be produced when one is score-­writing) do not match the sounds intended to be produced—­failures of fidelity. 2. The sounds produced do match, but on hearing them one decides to choose different sounds—­one’s intent changes.

Now failures of the second sort are not failures of fidelity, as they are not cases where one has failed to represent accurately (by whatever standards of accuracy are appropriate) what one intended to represent. Instead, failures of this latter sort seem to be failures to represent the right thing—­you have represented accurately, but have chosen the wrong thing to represent. Let us call this kind of failure failure of selection. The general thesis I want now to advance is this: 59.  Acts of collective improvisation have no single sound structure that any individual can be judging fidelity with respect to which can therefore act as a musical work, for one can only judge, at best, one’s individual contribution to the improvisation from the perspective of fidelity. In cases where a composer modifies her score not because it fails to accurately represent her musical ideas, but because she comes to change her musical ideas, such modifications are akin to choosing to represent a different, but related, musical work. This suggests a perhaps further difference between improvisation as work-­creating and such temporally extended and discontinuous acts of work creation via score writing. With improvisations any such changes of what one wishes to represent, for example what musical ideas to pursue, are per force but distinct temporal parts of the same musical work/improvisation, while such compositional edits in the score-­writing sense can be seen as terminating the coming-­to-­be of a given work in favor of another.

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In general (free) improvisations are only open to failures of selection, not failures of fidelity, while work-­creating performances in the context of traditional work creation are open to failures of fidelity and failures of selection. Let us see how this is the case by turning our attention to free improvisations. Does it make sense to conceive of free improvisations as being open to failures of fidelity? Is there something that, while improvising freely, one is intending to represent, that is, something whose features are known that one is attempting to reproduce via one’s sonic representation? Of course there is a notion of failure inherent in free improvisation. Not only might a performer or audience member judge a free improvisation in toto to be a failure, but an improviser might attempt something while improvising (the doubling of a line, a particular upper harmonic) and fail in the attempt. The improviser may flub a note, suffer from problems of intonation, and the like. Yet such errors are a risk in any sort of musical practice, and can be bracketed from consideration. For with improvisation, even with the case of flubbed notes, it is far from clear that such failures are failed attempts to represent something already conceived of. Part of the reason for this is a question of phenomenology; often while improvising, no such conscious act of attempting to match the sounds being improvised with some distinct entity (a thought, a tune in the head) seems to take place. Much improvisation, particularly when undertaken by experienced improvisers, lacks this conscious cognitive stage. One is certainly listening, thinking, responding, but rarely in a consciously, temporally successive sense—­ that is, listening, then thinking of an appropriate sonic response, and then attempting to sonically represent it by playing.60 When one considers an improvisation in toto, and removes cases of errors of execution, it appears that there is nothing that the improvisation itself can be judged against such that it may suffer failures of fidelity, since the improvisatory act seems to lack this conscious comparative component.61 If this is not what one is doing, what is one doing? Are free improvisations perhaps not representational after all? The issues surrounding the identity and individuation of cognitive states employed during improvisation are complex, even more so than those involved in what is called passive 60.  To relate this to the modal model, one is not consciously surveying possible ways the music might go and choosing one; rather, one is indicating the possible by actualizing it. 61.  This is particularly the case when you consider a collective improvisation in toto, as opposed to a given individual’s contribution to it.

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music-­listening or score-­driven musical performance. It may well be that improvisation does involve the representation of some mental content or other, but simply that we are not aware of this—­we do not consciously attempt to determine how best to represent this content via sound. There may be, in this sense, no intention to represent. Much improvising involves what is called “embodied knowledge,” which has as one of its phenomenological features the fact that conscious acts of deciding what to play, or how to play it (which would map onto deciding how to represent some thought or appropriate musical response), are largely absent. The knowledge of how and what to play is said to reside to a great extent in the body, in the limbs and lips. On this model improvisational responses appear to be automatic, self-­governing, and according to some, somewhat magical. Some of this mystery can be dispelled by realizing that embodied knowledge enters into all musical performance when performed by accomplished musicians. Accomplished instrumentalists, playing a musical work they are familiar with, need not consciously think of the work (perhaps via the score), then attempt to represent it sonically, matching up their playing to the notation. Their knowledge of the piece resides, so to speak, in their fingers, and the performer makes few conscious decisions about what to play and how to play it. So far as this goes, accomplished performance of preexisting works is similar to improvising. Yet such cases do still differ from improvisations in an important respect. First, even in cases where the performer of a classical piece performed a work with little if any consciousness of attempting to represent a score sonically, the score still establishes norms of correct performance (however elastic these may be), and so in retrospect such a performer may well recognize that shortcomings of their performance are, in fact, representational failures. An improviser whose performance is equally representationally opaque to her during performance might also in retrospect find fault with her performance, but such faults do not seem to be failures to represent adequately. The performer of the musical work can say, for example, “I should have played a B-­natural as the first note of the sixth bar,” and in this sense claim to have intended to do so, but to have failed. No such claim seems to hold for the free improviser; they merely can wish to have played something other than they did (I am often in this state!). The following is another way to make this point. Since there is a well-­ defined task that the performer of a score has before her, we can rightly say that a performer intends to perform the score (and so represent the work the score is of ) even in cases where the performer performs automatically, so to speak, without any conscious intentions. It is like a common example

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discussed in action theory concerning actions and intentions generally. If someone who knows how to start and drive a car, and does so regularly, mindlessly unlocks the car door, sits down, and turns the key in the ignition, it is usually thought by action theorists that they intend to start their car, and start their car intentionally. The intuition is this—­it would be odd to say of activities that we are so habituated to performing that they somehow come to be unintentional once we become truly expert at them. In such cases, if one fails to start the car, then one is failing to do what one intended to do. In the case of the expert performer of a score, such failures are then failures to do what one intended to do, and if we accept that performing the score is an act of representing, such failures are then failures of fidelity. But with free improvisation there is no such predetermined task that one is setting out to accomplish, and so no parallel with failing to succeed in completing a given task. Intentionality of the sort open to the precise articulation of what failing to act on the intentions amounts to is available in cases where tasks are predetermined (starting a car, performing a score) but not with free improvisations. In this sense, free improvisation appears to differ from the performance of precomposed works (even when the experiences of the performers do not significantly differ), since the latter are open to judgment (indeed, they demand to be) from the perspective of representational fidelity (even given the plasticity with respect to what such fidelity requires), while the former are not. Yet this is also a difference between free improvisations and works composed “traditionally” via score-­writing or performance. For, as discussed earlier, these cases seem often to involve conscious attempts to represent something perhaps heard in the head.62 So, to generalize, performances of pre-­composed works and “traditional” compositional actions may suffer from failures of representational fidelity, while with improvisations, the problem is not how you represent but what you choose to represent. Free improvisations are therefore open to failures of selection, but not failures of fidelity.63 We may here have finally discovered 62.  Of course many acts of traditional composition may well involve improvisatory elements in the sense described here. 63.  That free improvisations are open to failures of selection holds for any Platonist about musical structure who also is convinced that performances, including improvisations, are representations of musical structures. For on such an account, all improvisations are representations of eternally existing sound structures—­the very structure that they actualize in sound—­but even the slightest change in the improvisation is the actualization, and so representation, of a distinct sound structure. Improvisations represent their corresponding sound structures perfectly, always.

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a way to distinguish free improvisations from other acts of music-­making, one that does not require taking a particular stance on the precise nature of musical works, genres, scores, or composers. Let us take stock. We are now in a position to present a theory of the relationship of improvised performances to works that is flexible enough to help us make sense of a large number of improvised performances. First, we have seen that improvisations on preexisting pieces can be seen as representations of the pieces that manifest the improviser’s understanding of the piece. The improvisation as representation can profitably be seen as a case of paraphrase, an important way of manifesting one’s understanding of that which one paraphrases. Since there is here a subject for the paraphrase, the tune being represented, there is the possibility of failures of fidelity with respect to the representation—­it may fail to manifest the improviser’s understanding of the tune in question. We therefore tend to treat the tune (or whatever is the subject of the representation) as a musical work, since it is what one is trying to represent via performance. So Hawkins’s “Body and Soul” and Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” are performances of “Body and Soul” and “My Favorite Things,” respectively, insofar as they are representations of these tunes that manifest their understanding of them, such that their performances could, in principle, suffer from failures of fidelity. Free improvisations, insofar as there is nothing that the improvisation is consciously attempting to represent, do not seem to be open to failures of fidelity—­we might see fault with what an improviser chooses to play, but not with the degree and manner to which the improvisation represents something the improviser intended to represent.64 Failures of selection are at play here. What follows from this is that free improvisations are not performances of preexisting works. However, this does not mean that they cannot be either work-­creating performances or representations. They can be work-­ creating if the free improvisation itself comes to be represented by other performers/improvisers. It can become something with respect to which other improvisations can suffer failures of fidelity. Both Hawkins’s “Body and Soul” and assorted performances of “My Favorite Things” come to have this status.65 The question is whether such free improvisations are still profitably seen as being representations. We have seen that there is no obstacle per se in representations preexisting or being cocreated with that which they rep64.  Again, bracketing examples of flubbed notes, problems of intonation, and the like. 65.  In fact, “Body and Soul” comes to have this status for Hawkins himself, who had to spend much of his career performing his original improvisation on “Body and Soul.”

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resent. But now I want to sketch another sense in which free improvisations may be seen as representations—­a manner in which it becomes clear why they can only suffer from failures of selection, and not failures of fidelity. Although free improvisers are normally not consciously choosing to represent something via their improvisation, they are of course choosing what to play. Free improvisation is an intentional act, and the improviser, in the act of improvising, is faced with a wide (practically infinite?) range of responses they might make, and must choose which to make. It was this intimate relation between improvising and intention that concerned us in Chapter Two. This notion of selection suggests a manner in which such improvisations can still be seen as representational, although here we run up against the fuzziness with which the term “representation” is used. As mentioned above in Chapter Three, the most sophisticated theories of music cognition that have presently been developed have it that when listening to music, we are constantly creating mental representations of how the music might go in the immediate future. We engage, in effect, in a probabilistically complex act of guessing how the music might unfold—­ giving a high probability to certain future possibilities for the music and a low probability for others. Comparing how the music does unfold with how we predicted it might is thought to help explain a number of attitudes we take to music. If music always unfolds in a manner that we have given a high probability to, we will find it boring, trite, and formulaic. If it always unfolds in ways we take to be highly unlikely, we may judge the music to be chaotic, perhaps just noise, not even music at all. Aesthetically interesting music is thought to occupy the middle ground between the predictable and the wholly unexpected.66 The above sketch may help explain what audience members are doing when hearing music otherwise unknown to them (music where they do not know how it might unfold). If one is listening to music that one already knows, or performing music where how the music will unfold is predetermined to a great extent, this process is either largely absent or plays a far less important role in forming the judgments one will make about the music. However, when one is improvising, particularly in the context of group improvisation, one seems to be considering ways the music might unfold and actively choosing one of these ways to actualize. In this sense one is 66.  The details of such accounts, at the level of both mental processes and the factors that may go into the probability assignments we make, are open to debate. The fact that we can take enjoyment, and even find surprise, in music we have already heard demonstrates that this process can only be one part of the story of how we process music and come to enjoy it.

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attempting to represent a possible way the music might unfold—­you pick one to represent sonically. Therefore, an improvisation seems to discharge its representational function. But again, with representations such as this, only failures of selection seem possible, not failures of fidelity (again, barring considerations of “technical” mistakes). An improviser considers the many ways the music might go and picks one to make actual, and which musical future they pick is clearly a product of many complex cognitive, affective, and physical considerations (among others), but is essentially up to them—­we hold them responsible for their choice, and may fault their selection. If a free improvisation comes to have the status of a musical work, this is often due to the intentions of others to treat it as the object of representations open to failures of fidelity. But at the time of its initial sounding, there is no obvious work analogue there. In fact, with group improvisation you cannot even select a given future for the music in toto, for the way the improvisation will proceed is a product of group intentionality, where responsibility is distributed equally. Most improvised performances seem to be mixed. In the account we have developed, both Hawkins’s “Body and Soul” and Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” are performances of these tunes, and work-­creating performances, and as such they can be judged in two different ways. First, they can be judged on the degree to which they manifest understanding of the tunes, and so are open to failures of fidelity. Secondly, they can be considered from the perspective of being in a sense like free improvisations and open only to failures of selection. We consider the improvisations differently in each case, and might conclude, as some may have at the time, that a given Coltrane performance failed to be of “My Favorite Things,” but was “merely” an improvisation, perhaps even a work-­ creating one. Often improvisations may have something thinner than a work that they are trying to represent, and could perhaps therefore fail to do so—­say, a given blues progression, or some simply stipulated musical form—­and can therefore be judged from both perspectives of failure and selection. It is also possible that musical works might be on the scene for a performer, unbeknown to a listener. A given performer may be intending to represent a sound structure such that they know that failures of fidelity are possible, but the audience may not. This may well be the case with many performances, often taken falsely to be free improvisations, where no musical works are on the scene, for example, solo performances by Roscoe Mitchell or Cecil Taylor, where often, as a matter of fact, musical works are being performed.

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Coda: Signifying and Jazz Performance It is worth considering how the preceding discussion problematizes the signifying account of jazz improvisation, as originally developed by Henry Gates, Jr., in his magisterial book The Signifying Monkey, and as used by many jazz theorists. Gates considers jazz only briefly, but his account has been picked up by many. What I want to investigate is the relationship of signifying to both the form and meaning of an utterance—­a vexed question, I think, in Gates. For the proceeding discussion, influenced by Wittgenstein, demonstrates that meaning and form are more intimately related than one might think, particularly when one is considering the meaning of art objects. Gates’s detailed, historically informed, nuanced, and highly influential account of the black literary trope of all tropes, signifyin(g), is surprisingly ambivalent about the role signifyin(g) plays in the modification of that signified on.67 For Gates, signifyin(g), particularly when discussing its role in jazz performance, “is a mode of formal revision, it depends for its effects on troping, it is often characterized by pastiche, and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their differences.”68 The claim that signifyin(g) involves the repetition and modification of formal structures is, in and of itself, neutral as to whether it entails, or in any important way is about, meaning alteration. How is signifyin(g) related to paraphrase as we have developed that notion—­does it concern meaning at all? At times Gates seems to focus almost exclusively on signifyin(g) as mere formal revision, and formal revision that is not concerned with meaning at all. We read: “The Afro-­American rhetorical strategy of Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information-­giving, as Wittgenstein said of poetry.69 Signifyin(g) turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified.”70 It is interesting that Gates references Wittgenstein here, whose point is that poems have their meaning primarily internally, and that paraphrases of poems lose much of what the poems are about/for, since they are not primarily about the mediation of information that could be paraphrased. Yet Gates’s point 67.  Here, in the discussion of Gates, I will use his spelling, signifyin(g), which he uses to distinguish the essentially African American vernacular trope from the related, but crucially distinct, notion as found in Saussure and others. 68. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 52. 69.  “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-­game of giving information.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel. 70. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 53.

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does not seem to be that signifyin(g) operates wholly at the level of internal meaning (as with poetry), but that meaning per se is not the point. Signifyin(g) seems to be about structure, the “chain of signifiers,” more than about what is signified. Again, we read: “Signifyin(g), in other words, turns on the sheer play of the signifier. It does not refer primarily to the signified; rather, it refers to the style of language, to that which transforms ordinary discourse into literature. Again one does not Signify some thing; one Signifies in some way.”71 These accounts suggest that meaning is not at issue, but artful alteration of formal structures is all that is in play. Yet if signifyin(g) is not about meaning, it does not follow that the act of signifyin(g) does not affect the meaning of what is signified on or that the signifier is itself meaningless. For note that if we accept that signifyin(g) keeps the meaning fixed but alters the form, it looks just like paraphrase—­saying the same thing in a formally different way. But as we know, paraphrase only operates at the level of external meaning. So as long as that being signified on and the signifyin(g) utterance are content-­laden enough to have nontrivial internal meaning, there will be meaning change but it will involve internal, not external, meaning. So far as applying this to music, the passages from Gates we have looked at so far suggest a particular account of absolute music and the role of signifyin(g). For it looks like the account of signifyin(g), particularly when applied to music, is in sympathy with the accounts of music that have it as essentially meaningless, or as having, in effect, mere self-­referential meaning. For if music is simply a given sound structure, then signifyin(g) can be seen simply as playing with this structure in such a way that one can see how the original structure is still present, but has been transformed with “a signal difference.” While such an account of what jazz musicians do when improvising on a tune when signifyin(g) may well explain many such practices, is there any reason to think that it exhausts the function of signifyin(g) in jazz? The problem is this—­of course if one is committed to the meaninglessness of music then signifyin(g) can be only about structural alteration, the play of signifiers. But Gates himself, and certainly all those who have used the theory of signifyin(g) to make sense of jazz and other Afrological musics, want to foreground the meaning-­laden nature of such musics as repositories of cultural memory, as sites of identity construction, and so on.72 Once one 71. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 78. 72.  Two important examples of this would be Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.’s, The Power of Black Music.

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denies the “music for music’s sake only” position, signifyin(g), regardless of its intention, becomes a site for meaning alteration and construction, particularly when what is being signified on is something with important internal content. For, as we saw with the account of paraphrase, all alterations in structure yield a change in meaning, at least internal meaning. How important this alteration is will vary case by case. In signifying poems, the exact placement and wording of a line such as “his tail stuck out like a forty-­four” vs. “poppin’ his tail like a forty-­four” may matter little to the meaning of the poem (which, as Gates argues, is essentially about troping anyway). But need it be the same when one signifies on a song, or a genre of jazz? Does this leave the meaning of the original intact, or is one not of necessity offering a paraphrase or commentary, which necessarily operates at the level of meaning? Are signifyin(g) and musical formalism strange but happy bedfellows? Sometimes the confusion seems to center on the lack of meaning fixity of texts signified upon. Gates tells us that “meaning, in these [signifyin(g)] poems, is not proffered; it is deferred, and it is deferred because the relationship between intent and meaning, between speech act and its comprehension, is skewed by the figures of rhetoric or signification of which these poems consist.  .  .  . Never can this interpretation be definitive, given the ambiguity at work in its rhetorical structures.”73 Yet we need not assume that this means meanings are not themselves being played with, modified, and in that sense affirmed. Meaning may be deferred, it may be open to revision, it may be difficult to glean, and it may not be definitive, but still be present and at issue. Signifyin(g) does, I claim, entail a revision of meaning insofar as it involves the alteration of form, via which meaning is mediated. The meaning transformations may be minimal, or neither particularly important or interesting (perhaps as with many signifyin[g] poems), but this need not be and often is not the case with jazz improvisations viewed as signifying acts, since the musical works being improvised on and (so) signified upon often do have nontrivial meaning. Gates himself is ambivalent toward the issue of to what degree meaning alteration is involved, or important, in signifyin(g). At one point he states that meaning is devalued while the signifier is valorized in signifyin(g) poems, because the concepts in the poems themselves are shared, often repeated, and familiar.74 This suggests that meaning modification may not be important to such signifyin(g) acts, but does not entail that meaning 73. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 58. 74. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 61.

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modification does not take place. As he says, “as anyone who has heard these poems recited fully appreciates, they take their received meaning for granted and depend for their marvelous effect on the sheer play of the signifier.”75 However, one may not take for granted the meaning of many jazz works, particularly jazz standards, often performed instrumentally, that have associated words. Gates goes immediately on to discuss signifyin(g) in jazz, with the example of Jelly Roll Morton’s recording of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Gates claims that: Morton’s composition does not “surpass” or “destroy” Joplin’s; it completely extends and tropes figures present in the original. Morton’s Signification is a gesture of admiration and respect. It is this aspect of Signifyin(g) that is inscribed in the black musical tradition in jazz compositions such as Oscar Peterson’s “Signify” and Count Basie’s “Signifyin.” In these compositions, the formal history of solo piano styles in jazz is recapitulated, delightfully . . . as histories of the solo jazz piano, histories of its internal repetition and revision process. Improvisation, of course, so fundamental to the very idea of jazz, is “nothing more” than repetition and revision. In this sort of revision, again where meaning is fixed, it is the realignment of the signifier that is the signal trait of expressive genius. The more mundane the fixed text (“April in Paris” by Charlie Parker, “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane), the more dramatic is the Signifyin(g) revision. (my italics)76 This is a crucial passage for making sense of Gates’s account of the role of signifyin(g) in jazz. He sees signifyin(g) as an extension of the formal features of the work being signified so that the original work is still recognizable, and it is neither surpassed nor destroyed, but extended. This claim is in keeping with the modal model, for it states in effect that signifyin(g) acts need to be recognizable as performances of the work they are signifyin(g) on—­they need to be possible performances of the work. The talk of extension of the work suggests the Gates may think (although a commitment to this is neither necessary nor crucial to his theory) that jazz works change through histories of their performances. So far so good, but what now of meaning? If Gates views this perfor75. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 63. 76. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 70.

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mance of “Maple Leaf Rag” by Morton as presenting, in chronological order, a history of jazz solo piano styles, is this consistent with viewing jazz improvisation as “nothing more” than repetition with revision? The “nothing more” seems to serve the purpose of denying that meaning alteration is at play; “meaning is fixed,” he claims, and so improvising as signifyin(g) is “just” formal alteration of the sort where the musical form being signified upon is still recognizable. Something like this is what Matheson and Young were after in their theory of the ontological status of jazz improvisations on songs, although they seemed unaware of Gates’s pioneering work in this area, let alone that of Floyd and others.77 But is not the presentation of “Maple Leaf Rag,” in a variety of jazz styles, including those postdating its original composition, an alteration of its meaning? How can its meaning remain fixed if it is presented in the style of a number of distinct, if related, jazz genres? For do not genres vary precisely with respect to the meanings they suggest are present in performances, what musical parts are important, and where aesthetic interest may lie? By placing “Maple Leaf Rag” as originally written and performed by Scott Joplin in dialogue with jazz piano styles that postdate it, and with its own (future) history of jazz performance, Morton’s performance certainly takes on meaning different than that found in Joplin’s performance.78 Consider a far later (and in ways more revisionary) performance of another related Scott Joplin rag, “Weeping Willow Rag,” by the AACM ensemble Air.79 This performance too is clearly respectful, and not intended to replace any of its historical predecessors, but it clearly takes on meaningfulness distinct from that of either Joplin’s or Morton’s renditions. As we have seen in much of the preceding, examples such as these suggest that the works in question themselves change with their performance histo77.  Young and Matheson, “The Metaphysics of Jazz.” 78.  Curiously, Gates’s account of what Morton is doing in his performance of “Maple Leaf Rag” is very much like what hip-­hop artists do with the use of samples, where it is standard to claim that the meaning of the sampled work is altered when juxtaposed with other samples and when extracted from its original context. In effect the two meanings are placed in dialogue with each other, itself a kind of improvisational encounter. It is possible that Gates overemphasizes the mere formal revision that signifyin(g) effects due to a perhaps-­ unconscious acceptance of a global formalist theory of music, where music’s meaning can only be self-­referential, and so about its own form. When discussing the role of signifyin(g) in literary texts he is more attuned to the revisions of meaning that signifyin(g) results in, and the sense in which signifyin(g) texts are about a lack of fixity of meaning. 79. Air, AIR Lore. On this wonderful disc they also perform versions of Joplin’s “The Ragtime Dance” and two Jelly Roll Morton works, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” and “King Porter Stomp.”

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ries because they take on new meanings and open up new possibilities for future performance. In keeping with the account sketched above, it is more revealing to claim that such examples are cases of paraphrase of that which resists paraphrase and, as such, do entail meaning alteration. This need not be an alternative to signifyin(g), but an example of what signifyin(g) is when more than simple structural modification is at play. Gates’s examples of “mundane” texts for which signifyin(g) performances keep the meaning fixed, but dramatically revise the form, are telling. It is difficult to defend the view that Coltrane’s heartfelt revisions of “My Favorite Things” keep the ur-­meaning of the Broadway show tune intact. It flies in the face of all scholarship and criticism of Coltrane’s performances of this tune that I am aware of. Not only does Coltrane clearly alter the apparent meaning of “My Favorite Things” via his complex act of formal revision—­via his signifyin(g)—­but, so many argue and I agree, he intended these meaning revisions, for they are in keeping with his own accounts of his practices, and the practices of many like-­minded musicians at the time. There are places where Gates seems aware of the tension internal to his own account. We read, “Signifyin(g), in other words, is the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.  .  .  . Signifyin(g) presupposes an ‘encoded’ intention to say one thing but to mean quite another.”80 This account, which contrasts surface with deep meaning, or an apparent message with an intended contrasting message, foregrounds the meaning-­altering function of signifyin(g). Sure, the superficial meaning of “My Favorite Things” is still present, or perhaps accessible, and in that sense is stated by Coltrane’s performances. One can still hear, so to speak, the ode to “warm woolen mittens,” but can anyone really take the sonic onslaught of the version performed in Tokyo to really be about the pleasures enjoyed by coming-­of-­age Austrian aristocrats during World War II? Gates, blinded by the tremendous power of signifyin(g) to effect formal revision, to be the archetypical trope of intertextuality, seems to lose sight (at least when he turns to the role of signifyin[g] in music) of the fact that formal revision almost always results in meaning alteration (since it is form that is the primary bearer of meaning), and that jazz musicians are historically well aware of this fact and use it. The more meaning-­laden that which one is signifyin(g) on is, the more formal revision of it will yield meaning revision. This is unavoidable, but is not a problem—­it is another powerful feature of signifyin(g). 80. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 82.

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Index

Abrams, Muhal Richard, 204 Actuel, 155, 177 aesthetic thickening, 9, 142–­45, 147, 150, 154, 176, 179–­82, 197, 208, 213 appropriation: of black musics, 36–­38, 41, 53–­54 Armstrong, Louis, 133n59, 210 Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), 77, 154, 176, 179–­90, 192–­95, 199n105, 200, 208; Message to Our Folks, 179–­ 82, 200; performativity of, 193–­94 artificial intelligence. See machine intelligence Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), 7, 9, 33, 137, 145–­46, 157, 176–­78, 180–­81, 184–­ 85, 188–­90, 192–­202, 204–­5, 207–­11, 219, 254

189–­92, 203; Tri–­Axium Writings, 190–­92, 203 bricolage, 39n8, 56, 183n78, 197, 200 Brown, James, 54–­55

Baraka, Amiri, 31n61, 120n31, 166, 198n104 Basie, Count, 131n55, 253 Beastie Boys, The, 8, 37–­41, 46–­49, 52–­53 Black Arts Movement, 154, 157, 159, 165–­69 black feminism, 159–­72, 175. See also Lee, Jeanne Black Women’s Alliance (BWA), 167–­68 Blasé, 155, 157–­58, 176, 180. See also Lee, Jeanne Bowie, Lester, 77, 175, 192, 192n90, 194 Braxton, Anthony, 2–­4, 154, 177, 179,

Cage, John, 88, 177–­79, 194, 197 Cherry, Don, 154 Chinese Room thought experiment, 73–­ 76, 85, 93, 95–­96 Coleman, Ornette, 127n45 Collins, Bootsy, 55 Coltrane, John, 1, 6, 12, 31, 141, 176, 196, 210, 218; “My Favorite Things” 2–­3, 15, 21, 33, 105–­15, 118–­19, 121–­28, 134, 136, 147, 214–­15, 219, 222, 224–­27, 234–­37, 247, 249, 253, 255 composition: and improvisation, 2, 4–­5, 14–­15, 17, 64, 67–­68, 188–­89, 239–­49; relationship to performance, 38, 47, 52; as representation, 242–­ 43 Crispell, Marilyn, 2, 4 Cyrille, Andrew, 154 Davis, Miles, 32, 49n40 Diamond, Michael. See Beastie Boys Dixon, Bill, 11–­12, 32 Ellington, Duke, 6–­7, 176, 210 fallibilism, 239–­49 Favors, Malachi, 180, 190

263

264  •  Index free improvisation, 2, 10, 104, 134–­35, 189, 214–­15, 239, 244–­49 Garrison, Jimmy, 1 gender equality, 156–­64, 174. See also black feminism genre: determinations, 139–­41, 146–­ 147, 150; and history, 148, 150–­53; multiplication, 147–­50, 156–­57, 176, 179–­183; and musical understanding, 139–­48; theory of, 6–­9 Grateful Dead, 141, 146 Great Black Music, 7–­8, 33, 179, 194, 197–­99, 201 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 105 Hawkins, Coleman, 247, 249 hybrid arts, 8, 22–­29; improvised music as, 27–­28; jazz as, 10–­11, 27–­28 Improvisation: and autonomy, 177–­78; and composition, 2, 4–­5, 14–­15, 17, 64, 67–­68, 188–­89, 239–­49; as ethical practice, 68–­71, 116n25, 155–­ 58, 173–­175; free, 2, 10, 104, 134–­35, 189, 214–­15, 239, 244–­49; as hybrid art, 27–­29; and intentionality: 60–­72, 76, 78n38, 87–­88, 244, 249; by machines, 71, 75–­77, 82–­88, 98–­99; as paraphrase, 232–­35, 238–­ 39; relationship to performance, 9–­10, 69–­70, 118; as representation, 215, 219–­22, 225–­28, 239–­40, 244, 246n63, 247–­48; subjectivity and, 92–­97; as work–­creation, 239–­41, 243n59, 244, 249 Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP), 116n25, 206 intellectual property law, 8, 35–­56 intentionality: and improvisation, 60–­ 72, 76, 78n38, 87–­88, 244, 249; of machines, 78–­87; and music–­making: 8–­9, 57–­65, 68, 71, 106 International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), 116n25, 206

Jackson, John Shenoy, 204 Jarman, Joseph, 180, 190, 197–­99 jazz, 29–­30, 54–­56; avant-­garde, 31–­32; as genre, 7–­8; as hybrid art, 10–­11, 27–­ 28; philosophy of, 5–­7; and politics, 14n19, 18, 32–­33; and race, 32–­33; signifying in, 250–­55 Jenkins, Leroy, 177, 179 Jones, Elvin, 1, 106 Jones, LeRoi, 31n61, 120n31, 166, 198n104 Joplin, Scott, 253–­54 law. See intellectual property law Lee, Jeanne, 31, 33, 154–­64, 166–­75, 180; “Blasé,” 155, 159, 163–­65, 167–­68, 170–­75, 206n120; “My Angel,” 155, 159, 161–­63, 164n48, 170, 174, 176; “Sophisticated Lady,” 155, 159–­62, 176; “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” 155, 159, 174–­76 Lewis, George, 72–­73, 75–­84, 86, 91, 96, 101 Lincoln, Abbey, 33n64, 158n37, 160n43, 169–­71 machine intelligence, 71–­81, 91, 98 machines: agency of, 71–­74, 77–­84, 86, 88–­89; as improvisers, 71, 75–­77, 82–­ 88, 98–­99; intentionality of, 78–­87; as performers, 87–­89 Malcolm X, 166, 168–­70 Miller, Glenn, 53 Mingus, Charles, 7n7, 49n40, 54, 100n69, 131, 133n59, 219n14 Mitchell, Roscoe, 21, 31, 177, 188, 249 modernism: vs. postmodernism, 184–­88, 190, 192–­97, 200, 203 Morton, Jelly Roll, 253–­54 Moye, Don, 190, 194 Murray, Sunny, 154–­55 musical works: completion of, 129–­35; and improvisation, 16–­17, 20, 103–­ 4, 214; and individual perception, 116–­20, 136; and intentionality, 8–­9, 57–­65, 68, 71, 106; nature of, 36–­37, 39–­47, 50–­52, 54–­56; relationship to

Index  • 265 performance, 17–­18, 37–­38, 104–­17, 120–­26, 129; revision of, 132–­34; theorization of, 13–­21 Newton, James, 8, 37–­42, 46–­49, 50n43, 53, 57; “Choir” 38, 41n13, 46–­47, 49, 51, 55 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 53 Parker, Charlie, 125, 180, 219, 253 performance: and individual perception, 116–­20; as musical understanding, 139; nature of, 2, 106, 134; as representation of works, 216–­28, 239–­ 40, 245 Peterson, Oscar, 253 postmodernism: vs. modernism, 184–­88, 190, 192–­97, 200, 203 race, 41–­43, 53–­54, 144–­145, 156, 158, 209–­10; and representation, 217–­20, 223. See also black feminism Reich, Steve, 193 relational aesthetics, 9, 184–­85, 201–­8 representation: and fidelity, 142, 214–­

15, 240, 242n58, 243–­44, 246–­49; improvisation as, 215, 219–­22, 225–­28, 239–­40, 244, 246n63, 247–­48; as paraphrase, 227–­39; visual, 215, 218–­ 24, 236 Roach, Max, 158n37, 169, 219n14 Rogers, Richard, 105 sampling, 36, 38, 39n8, 40–­41, 53, 55–­56, 109–­10 Shepp, Archie, 154–­55, 158, 159n40, 160, 163, 172–­73 signifying: in jazz, 250–­55 Smith, Wadada Leo, 6, 33, 42, 176–­79; “Silence” 176–­79, 193 subjectivity: improvisation and, 92–­97 Sun Ra, 22, 24, 30n58, 120n31 Taylor, Cecil, 6, 31, 33, 161, 249 Turing test, 72, 74–­75, 77, 84–­86, 96 Tyner, McCoy, 1 Voyager, 72–­73, 75–­85, 92–­93, 96–­97; sonic identity of, 79–­82, 101 Zorn, John, 182–­83