“You Can't Dance to It”: Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Daedalus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 148 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Wells
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
Listening Behavior ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Modes Of Engagement ◽  
Off Time

Central to dominant jazz history narratives is a midcentury rupture where jazz transitions from popular dance music to art music. Fundamental to this trope is the idea that faster tempos and complex melodies made the music hostile to dancing bodies. However, this constructed moment of rupture masks a longer, messier process of negotiation among musicians, audiences, and institutions that restructured listening behavior within jazz spaces. Drawing from the field of dance studies, I offer the concept of “choreographies of listening” to interrogate jazz's range of socially enforced movement “scores” for audience listening practices and their ideological significance. I illustrate this concept through two case studies: hybridized dance/concert performances in the late 1930s and “off-time” bebop social dancing in the 1940s and 1950s. These case studies demonstrate that both seated and dancing listening were rhetorically significant modes of engagement with jazz music and each expressed agency within an emergent Afromodernist sensibility.

THE NON-CANONIC STATUS OF MOZART’S CANONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL ZASLAW
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Falling Up

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-129
Author(s):  
Clinton McCallum
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Spiritual Transcendence ◽  
Modal Jazz ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Ring Shout ◽  
Black Gospel Music

This article investigates melodic figures and harmonic sequences that miraculously only step up to illuminate an aesthetic lineage that connects gospel to electronic dance music. It argues that the synth-risers and ever-opening filters of contemporary euphoric rave music like happy-hardcore and uplifting-trance find precedence in compositional devices that made their way into funk/soul and disco/garage from Black gospel music, and that these gospel inventions were derived from the Afro-diasporic ring-shout. Cognitive linguistic and psychoacoustic theories premise an analytical framework for musical representations of endless ascent. Through close readings of representative recordings—a 1927 Pentecostal sermon by Reverend Sister Mary Nelson, James Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still,” Chic’s “Le Freak,” Trussel’s “Love Injection,” and DJ Hixxy’s remix of Paradise's “I See the Light”—the article examines various historical intersections with parlour music, European art music, and modal jazz, and suggests that musical ascent has a non-causal but, nevertheless, objective relationship with a type of spiritual transcendence.

Orientalism in the Art Music of the Ionian Islands

2019 ◽  
pp. 296-317
Author(s):  
Kostas Kardamis
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ionian Islands ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Ionian Islands were at an early stage cut off from the Eastern Roman Empire, experienced the changes that came with the Renaissance, actively participated in the Enlightenment and were in contact with the multifarious ideologies of the 19th century. These factors transformed their art music, which followed the ‘western’ trends. In this context, ‘orientalism’ appeared as an additional creative element in certain indigenous composers’ works. Its use ranged from the stereotypical ‘western’ approach regarding the Orient to the employment of ‘oriental’ elements as media of political (especially during the struggles for the Islands’ annexation to the Greek Kingdom), national (as a conventional ‘Greek characteristic’) and social statements, and as a way for the works’ entrepreneurial promotion to a larger audience. The chapter discusses these changing—and often concurrent and diverging—attitudes through case studies; it stresses that ‘orientalism’ never became a compositional fixation for Ionian Islands composers.

Dance Music and Signification in Handel’s Opera Seria

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-162
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Decker
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Italian Language ◽  
Opera Seria ◽  
Modern Analytical ◽  
Historical Thought

This chapter makes a case for the interpretive significance of Baroque topics by examining historical thought and modern analytical precedent, detailing the types of significations these topics might convey, and presenting case studies that demonstrate the efficacy of musical topics in the analysis of opera seria. These case studies are drawn from the Italian-language operas of G. F. Handel and focus on his uses of the minuet and the gigue. The strategic use of dance topics in the late Baroque was likely meaningful to Handel’s audiences and can still be useful for interpretation today.

Embodying Musical Space

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 132-139
Author(s):  
Stephanie Schroedter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
New Interactions ◽  
And Training

The epoch-making dance reforms of the early twentieth century did not only lead to new dance techniques, styles, and movement concepts, but also to an intensive search for new dialogues between music/sound and dance/movement. These new interactions were notable for their reliance on pre-existing music that was usually not intended for dance. Analogous to the choreographers' search for new movements in new (sound) spaces, composers looked for a new physicality of sounds (musical gestures), as well as for new spaces inside and outside of these sounds. Following these mid-twentieth-century developments, choreographers have increasingly chosen “new music” for their creations—compositions beyond the classical repertoire. In my paper, I will explore the choreographic possibilities of “new (non-dance) music” by comparing two examples: Bill T. Jones' solo danced to Edgar Varèses' Ionisation and a solo created by Martin Schläpfer using György Ligeti's Ramification. These examples will serve as case studies to argue for my concept of “kinesthetic listening,” which can be applied to a more general approach to discussions of the embodiment of music. This concept includes not only the perspective of the choreographer and interpreter/dancer, but also the perception of the spectator/listener. As a precondition, music/sound is understood as movement: an audible but not visible, rather an imaginable/imaginary movement that can (but need not) interact with body movements. Body movements/dance, in turn, can interact with music according to different choreographic strategies. To analyze these choreomusical dialogues, a special combination of (and training in) listening to and watching movement is required—informed by models of analysis from musicology and dance studies as well as from phenomenology and cognitive sciences.

scholarly journals THE IMPORTANCE OF 1959-1967 PERIOD IN JAZZ HISTORY

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (86) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Third Stream ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hard Bop ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Musical Understanding

The focus of this study is on the history of jazz music between 1959 and 1967. The 1950s was a period of intense creativity in jazz, defined by emerging styles such as third stream, cool jazz and hard bop. The end of that decade, 1959, is considered to be a watershed year in which some of jazz’s most influential recordings were made and also effected the free jazz movement, which dominated until 1967, known as the "year that jazz music died". Therefore, 1959 becomes a bridge between the stylistic homogeneity of first half of the century and an outpouring of creativity in the second half. The echoes of the pre-fusion period 1959-1967 are still influential on the musical output of jazz in the twenty first century. This study aims to convey the variety of jazz styles between 1950 and 1967 by looking at the foundational elements that create the musical understanding of these styles by means of a descriptive methodology. Keywords: Jazz, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, 1959, Third Stream, Cool Jazz, Avant-Garde

The Micropolitics of Exchange

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Elswit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

Exile has received relatively little attention in dance studies, although forced migration in the mid-twentieth century reconfigured artistic and intellectual landscapes on multiple continents. This chapter turns to German dance during and after the Third Reich, while drawing on theoretical and historical treatments of exile developed in other disciplines, as well as constructions of national identity. Such perspectives on displacement suggest that it is not the place of exiled artists, which needs to be reassessed within national dance histories; rather, these artists offer an opportunity to assess the contours of the historical narrations themselves and, with them, other forms of belonging. The case studies of Valeska Gert and Kurt Jooss highlight the micropolitics of exile’s transnational exchange. These intricate, personalized crosscurrents were catalyzed by survival strategies that registered in the work itself and left traces in history, which can only be seen by engaging with multiple forms of otherness.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Central Research ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dance Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter defines the scope of the problem, and the central research question: Are there consistent patterns of political intent and impact in diverse public dance movements throughout the social history of the Americas? It surveys the existing literature from the fields of dance studies, anthropology, musicology, and cultural history. It lays out the argument, methodology, and disciplinary sources and explains the criteria for the selection of the specific case studies, linking the diversity of those case studies to the diversity of methodological tools necessary for their analysis and comparison.

Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Between Beats ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Christi Jay Wells
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
Guiding Questions ◽  
Institutional Cultures

Through an interrogation of hybrid social dance/jazz concert events held in Atlanta in 1938, this chapter presents the book’s guiding questions and methods, which also stem from the author’s own experience as a social jazz dancer. Applying Susan Foster’s model of choreography as a broadly applicable analytic for the socially reinforced structuring of movement in space, it asks how and why jazz audiences’ default listening postures have moved from standing and dancing to relatively motionless sitting and listening. Exploring this question requires a critical, reflective look at the role of bodies in intellectual and aesthetic hierarchies and the complex webs of desire and anxiety that have shaped American institutional cultures’ conflicted relationships with music, with dance, and with all things corporeal. Critiquing the valorization of transcendence and universalism in American aesthetic discourses and in jazz music history specifically, this chapter advances an embodied approach to jazz history where dance becomes a point of entry into stories that de-center the pillars upon which jazz music’s canonic historical and ideological narratives rest. Following choreographer/folklorist Mura Dehn’s description of social jazz dancing, this book thus advances a perspective that operates “between the beats” of jazz history’s canonic time-spaces, seeking to focus on dancing and musicking as practices that begin within the body and to dig into the complex and messy viscera underneath the skin of those narratives that form the so-called jazz tradition.

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