A Classical Composer Reads Stomping the Blues 

Classical composition is about perfection, jazz improvisation is about life itself.
DALL·E 2024-10-20 15.04.09 - A jazz-themed image in art deco style featuring musicians playing instruments such as a saxophone, trumpet, and double bass. The background incorporat

Remarks read at the “Shaping an Omni American Future” online colloquium in 2021

This presentation looks at two matters pertaining to jazz. These include the differing features between folk, pop and fine art music, and the placement of jazz in the realm of fine art music. I discuss the art of improvisation both in jazz and classical music as well as its relationship to composition per se in classical music, within the domain of art music. This is all in reference to, or perhaps in this context it might be better to say, a riff upon ideas pertaining to these topics found in Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues.  

Folk art can be profound, but it’s limited. As Murray states, “Folk expression is nothing if not conventional in the most fundamental sense of the word.” Folk art is usually performed, or learned, or passed down, by ear. This by necessity means that there are certain limitations on complexity and depth of meaning, perhaps one should even say imagination. It has little individual voice; after all, it is of the folk. It is concerned with maintaining standards and is derivative. “Invention comes from people of special talent and genius, not from those who are circumscribed by routine.”

Popular music was referred to by Gunther Schuller, the musical polymath, as commercial music. It is written to make money. It has low content or meaning and must fit into very proscribed constraints. Real creativity is very small because its language is limited and circumscribed. It is meant as entertainment. Its goal is to make people feel good more than it is about the integrity of the musical object itself. However, one must ask about the use of popular materials, or folk materials, by fine art and jazz composers. These composers take materials of folk and popular music, and raise them up, through the use of more sophisticated and individual processes, into objects of art.

The larger fine art vocabulary allows for a wider, and more personal, range of expression. Hemingway said: 

All art is only done by the individual… the individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point… He takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

The composer must have knowledge and craft, hours of practice and work, to produce something that matters.  Little can be said if there is limited experience and vocabulary with which to speak. This is true of both classical and jazz artists, while their domains of expertise might differ.

Let’s talk about those fine arts of classical music and jazz, and an aspect that unites them, the art of improvisation, and its relationship to composition. 

Classical music is a phenomenon of Western Civilization. It deals in its own idiosyncratic ways with various musical parameters, including pitch, rhythm, color and timbre. It also involves the phenomenon of musical notation. The classical music of most other cultures do not have this aid. Secondly, polyphony (numerous lines moving together) and the resultant harmony (the sounding of notes together with meaning) was a revolutionary and singular idea. 

Jazz is an American creation; an Afro-U.S. admixture, with influences from Africa and Europe.

The best jazz musicians found and developed new important aspects of the classical tradition. They played mostly Western instruments. Its language was part of the West, as it uses harmonic materials, rhythms, and timbres from that tradition, but developed them in new ways.

The best jazz musicians found and developed new important aspects of the classical tradition. They played mostly Western instruments. Its language was part of the West, as it uses harmonic materials, rhythms, and timbres from that tradition, but developed them in new ways.

For example, its use of rhythmic syncopation, and  its approach to time, was new. Its interest in timbre, as displayed with various mutes in the brass, and changing colors of vibrato, was new. So too was its inversion of the understanding of the relationship of instruments and voice:  while in classical all instrumentalists learn to play like the singing voice, in jazz this was turned on its head―-voices sing like instruments, as evidenced in scat.

Both classical music and jazz rely on a particular but differing understanding of improvisation. Classical composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were fine improvisers. They improvised music in real time, and then may have written some of it down to create some, or parts of, their pieces. Composition itself may be considered an interaction with the improvised materials of the mind; the playful interaction of mind and material that then becomes fixed as an object that is finally out of time, a fixed artifact.

Jazz relies on composed materials, designated as the song (tune or melody) or riff (in classical, a motive). The improviser creates variations in real time. If the classical composer is concerned with the finished product, the jazz improviser is more interested in the process of creation. The former has found the object in his musical artifact, and the latter is often seeking the object. While the classical composer has found the musical object that becomes transformed in the process of composition, the jazz improviser is often involved in finding the idea, in the process of birthing the idea. The former presents the finished object ― it is meant to be pristine and as close to perfection as possible ― while the latter presents the creation process itself. One is about the state of perfection and the other is about life itself.

Fundamental to life is “the Blues”—those feelings that we all recognize. And thus we find that jazz is a way of confronting, battling with, struggling with, those eternal feelings found in man. Murray says that the

fundamental function of the jazz musician …..is not only to drive the Blues away and hold them at bay,…but also to evoke an ambiance of Dionysian revelry in the process. The music comes out of both ballroom dances and life celebrations of birth, birthdays, and death.

As a response to this dance of life, jazz is also about elegance, or a refined style:

A jam session for all its casual atmosphere is not a wide open free for all or anything goes. It is the exclusive province of the dedicated professional to whom Blues music is ..a fine art requiring the very highest level of technical mastery of one’s instrument as well as unflagging spur of the moment inventiveness. In order to acquit himself with competence in a jam session a Blues musician must not only be a virtuoso performer but must also be able to create in a split second the most complex figures and runs. Elegance under pressure or bust.

This music of sadness and joy finds a profound relationship with music of the Black church. For Murray, it is a very thin line between the two, gospel music and secular jazz. After all, the best of all music certainly seeks a religious or secularized transcendence. It is meant to take us to a deeper meaning of life and mortality. While jazz is coming out of the black experience in America, it is not isolated or hermetic, but has universal implications, and thus lies in the vast narrative of human experience. Such is the case, for example, with a performance of Louis Armstrong playing When the Saints Go Marching In, which displays that sweet bitterness, or bitter sweetness, of life and all its limitations.

While jazz is coming out of the black experience in America, it is not isolated or hermetic, but has universal implications, and thus lies in the vast narrative of human experience. Such is the case, for example, with a performance of Louis Armstrong playing When the Saints Go Marching In, which displays that sweet bitterness, or bitter sweetness, of life and all its limitations.

Jazz is more like the spoken word, while classical music is more like the written word. Jazz is more about stream of consciousness; classical music is more like the contemplation and refinement of consciousness. Jazz is often learned by ear (off of records), and classical by sight (scores). Classical is about the idea made musical word and jazz about the feeling made sound.

To conclude, it was stated earlier that classical composition is about perfection, while jazz improvisation is about life itself. These two avocations meet, as Rob Gibson states in the introduction to Murray’s book, in “the nature of human life.”

Dan Asia, President of the Center for American Culture and Ideas and Professor Emeritus of the University of Arizona, is a composer, conductor, writer, and educator.

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