The Anxieties of Empires and decolonizing musicology, how Anglo-American musicology is having a debate about the primacy of German music, sort of

If the British Empire and it's spin-off the United States of America had not more or less continuously exerted world-defining influence and power across the entire planet we might not be seeing the back and forth debates we've been seeing about whether or not Anglo-American musicology needs to be "decolonized" by way of giving less emphasis to the would-be German empire we helped defeat in two wars inside the last century.

For reasons I admit I have not discerned, Norman Lebrecht has posted as an “exclusive” that J. P. E. Harper-Scott has decided to withdraw from academia in response to “woke” musicology.   A dutiful addition of a composer who “can’t be decolonized” was added that mentioned that Franz Liszt could not be decolonized.  

But how can the announcement have been an “exclusive” when it was sitting at Harper-Scott’s website for the whole world to read?

https://jpehs.co.uk/why-i-left-academia/

…

I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.

 

Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.

 

The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.  …

So Harper-Scott has announced he has left academia.  This move seems indicative, writing as someone outside academia, like a small part of a set of conflicts between British leftists and American progressives in Anglo-American musicology.  Harper-Scott is hardly a political reactionary but Americans might get the idea that he is. The tricky thing about attempting to parse debates and battles through a left/right binary is that there’s no shortage of radical musicians in terms of politics who were traditionalist in their musical styles (Hans Eisler, for instance, or a raft of Soviet composers).  Ian Pace has been arguing for both leftist politics and against what he regards as the “deskilling” of musicology, as well as having a discussion about the hegemonic influence of Anglo-American popular musics.  Harper-Scott has, so far, not struck me as being nearly as specific as Pace.  That sort of thing was on my mind when I wrote “hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer “ years ago. British musicologists being concerned about the hegemonic influence of American popular music can sincerely think that in terms of market presence Anglo-American pop has ruled the world and that Anglo-American pop could and has included blues and jazz.

Ethan Iverson on jazz, classical music, and Mary Lou Williams' History of Jazz Tree and some thoughts about why I find Nikolai Kapustin's preludes and fugues more compelling than his piano sonatas

I've written about Nikolai Kapustin's music in the past and maybe one day I'll even blog about his preludes and fugues, which I have really enjoyed over the years.  But right now I want to talk about how I have found that I enjoy his piano sonatas okay while I'm listening to them and then can't remember most of them after the fact. 

One of the reasons I suspect Kapustin's piano sonatas go in one ear and out the other for me is a problem of thematic differentiation.  Kapustin would have hated having his sonatas compared to the piano sonatas of Medtner but I think the comparison is apt, at least in the sense that both composers seemed to write one gigantic sonata in an installment plan, as Kyle Gann sort of put it about Medtner years ago. 

But I think there might be another way to describe the difference between Kapustin's piano sonatas and his preludes and fugues. A fugue is an elaborative process for a riff, or, if you will, the fugue subject often has a groove it can be used to explore and Kapustin's fugues work better than his piano sonatas do for me because the fugal composition process is so inherently open-ended and groove-driven (if you're any good at it) that it is in some ways more compatible with jazz than too many of the post-A. B. Marx approaches to sonata forms in the West.  After all, Russian theorists don't necessarily seem to think about sonata forms the way Germans do.

But let me finally get to Ethan Iverson's old blog post because I found it helpful.

John Borstlap on Nikolai Kapustin's `vulgarisation' of Bach in 24 Preludes and Fugues, a direct question about what (if anything) was vulgarized

Ever since Roger Scruton died last year I have been considering his interaction with (and significant debt to) the work of Theodor Adorno.  I was first inspired to go actually read Adorno after reading John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution.  Regular readers of this blog may recognize that Borstlap and I frequently differ on a specific set of topics.  He may believe, entirely erroneously, that I am in some kind of cultural relativist camp when I am not.  

Borstlap argued last year that classical music is not conservative.  I'm open to such a proposal provided there is room to explain what is meant by conservativism and, more pointedly, what conservatives seek to conserve.  Borstlap made his case as follows:

crossing the threshold of 2020 to 2021--the deaths of Claude Bolling and Eugene Wright, some thoughts on jazz-classical synthesis during the Cold War

The French bandleader, pianist, composer and jazz-classical fusionist Claude Bolling died on December 29, 2020.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/claude-bolling-dead/2020/12/31/7e191ba2-4b6d-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html

Claude Bolling, a French pianist, composer and bandleader who became one of the most successful jazz musicians in Europe and gained a devoted following across the Atlantic with his pleasing fusions of the jazz and classical traditions, died Dec. 29 in Garches, a suburb of Paris. He was 90.

A devotee since childhood of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other eminences of American jazz, Mr. Bolling grew up listening to their music on the radio until World War II intervened. “Jazz was all but banned by the Nazis in my country,” he told the Hartford Courant. “So I got most of my jazz from 78 rpm recordings.”

Mr. Bolling said Ellington took him in “as part of his family” when they met in the 1960s, by which time the Frenchman had embarked on his career as a bandleader. Describing the effect of Mr. Bolling’s music, trumpeter Louis Armstrong was reputed to have declared that “my heart will never forget the sounds he made.”

Those sounds were not daring — Mr. Bolling generally hewed to traditional jazz — but they won him steady audiences in Europe and the United States for decades.

Saying that Bolling's sounds were not daring is both true in the sense that jazz had moved away from Ellington's baseline of style and that cool, free jazz and other styles have developed by the time Bolling had formalized his style.  But at another level it might also be true to say that Bolling's sound could be thought of as almost indistiguishable in some ways from Dave Brubeck.

some more thoughts on the death of Nikolai Kapustin--how the formerly Soviet composer's work can reveal that metahistorical/political narratives in the West didn't really promote successful 3rd stream anymore than residual Socialist Realism might have

The more time passes since the end of the Cold War the more we in the West get to learn about what the arts were like in the Soviet bloc.  The more we learn about how diverse and varied music in central and eastern Europe and Soviet Asia was the more ludicrous the claim that Western arts are more diverse and liberal due to claims of "freedom". Not that I wish to have born anywhere else but the United States of America, for a variety of reasons I've no obligation to share at even my own blog, but my larger point is that now that the Cold War has been over for a generation or two certain mythologies that were applied to, say, jazz, by Cold War era intellectuals no longer have to be taken as "the" narrative for an urban style of popular music that has been truly global since a century ago.

assorted playlists of cycles of preludes and fugues where composers experimented with adding jazz elements

In his book Composing the Part Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and Easter Germany David G. Tompkins mentioned something I hadn't heard or seen in writings about socialist realism in American writings.  He pointed out that the lifespan of officially socialist realist music wasn't especially long.  The prescriptive ideology began to fall out of favor in Poland and East Germany as early as the mid-1950s.  By the mid-1950s Polish intellectuals were urging that the nation's musicians and music programs be open to jazz. see page 44. Tompkins.  If socialist realism was not exactly repudiated there were attempts to finesse and expand its definition to be more inclusive.

http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557536471
https://oapen.org/search?identifier=649954

The Tompkins book isn't exactly breezy or light reading but it's fascinating as a reference for musicians and Western readers whose understanding of how socialist realism worked (and didn't work) as an aesthetic/political philosophy played out differently in Poland and eastern Germany than it did in the Soviet Union proper.  It's so dry, personally, I'm still in the earlier chapters to be honest, but reading about how within just a couple of years of the death of Stalin there were Polish intellectuals and artists who began to call for openness to jazz might be a good thumbnail sketch reminder to Western readers that jazz was well-known in the mid-twentieth century in the Soviet bloc, if not necessarily officially approved.

Although Rodion Shchedrin experimented with adding jazz vocabulary into some of his piano concerti he didn't exactly add jazz harmonies or riffs into his preludes and fugues or polyphonic notebook to the extent that I could confidently include him in this little weekend playlist.

These are all cycles of preludes and fugues I eventually want to blog about some day but the thing about music is that if you can't hear the music there's only so much you can meaningfully say about the music that a reader could understand.  I'm planning on returning to blogging about the Koshkin preludes and fugues next month after I simmer in the sonic goodness of the forthcoming Asya Selyutina recording of the first half of the cycle due out on Naxos next month.  These are part of big list of to-get-to writing for Wenatchee The Hatchet.  If you haven't heard these cycles there are playlists via Youtube and all of these cycles are available in recorded form if you like one of them enough to listen.

Now the first is recorded, complete, by the composer himself and Kapustin is pretty formidable in keyboard technique.  This is, so far, my favorite of the cycles of preludes and fugues that aim to develop a synthesis of jazz vocabulary with fugal technique.  Kapustin has never identified himself as a jazz composer and also rejects the categories "fusion" and "third stream".  He's what we might have to call a "classical" composer who stays strictly in the "classical" lane but makes use of jazz vocabulary from Tatum and Petersen as the spark of inspiration for his approach to fugue.

Nikolai Kapustin
24 preludes and fugues, Op. 82
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYFEFXbNeQQ

It has only been this year, it seems, that Alie Anne Yorgason has written a dissertation specifically on Op. 82 which I haven't had the opportunity to read.  Op. 82 dates back to 1997 so it's been around for 22 years by now but has not gotten much attention in the West.  It should.  I think it is probably the most successful cyclical work in "classical" music to draw inspiration from the vocabulary of jazz while staying in what people would call the "classical" wheelhouse.

That said, there have been other cycles.

Fugal Dreams, by Richard Bellak, is a cycle I listened to in the last year and it's not nearly as much my cup of tea but writing fugues at all calls for enough technique in instrumental and compositional terms it's at least worth giving a listen.  If Kapustin's style could be described as firmly and unabashedly indebted to a Tatum/Petersen or maybe even a Bud Powell sound Bellak's cycle might come across as more Brubeck/Evans and, this would be less complimentary for some jazz fans, more on the cool side than the swing or bebop eras.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfNhPd1qANo&list=OLAK5uy_nnPRuZnY3QnA3KxpWskPfdspEUtvpc08o

I'm a bit more fond of Michelle Gorrell's set, which has not been recorded in total in a commercial way yet but that you can hear over yonder.

Michelle Gorrell
Well Tempered Licks and Grooves, Books 1 & 2
http://www.michellegorrell.com/Clips%20and%20examples/Well%20Tempered%20Licks%20and%20Grooves%20Bk1.htm

Boosey & Hawkes is still preparing the second half for publication in score form.  I've got the first half.  This is more explicitly ... I'm going to have to call it neo-Baroque.  The influence of jazz and ragtime and blues is front and center but Gorrell handles form and line in a more neo-Baroque way.  She's drawing inspiration from jazz and ragtime but isn't trying to create preludes and fugues that attempt to catch the "spirit" of them in the way American fans of jazz or blues might describe it.  There's a lot I like about this cycle and so far I would say that if Kapustin is the most effective at synthesizing jazz vocabulary with fugal technique in the "East" then Gorrell has written the cycle I've heard that does a good job of such a fusion in the "West".

Probably the most ambitious effort in the U.S., also dating from the late 1990s, seems to be Henry Martin's 24 preludes and fugues.  This is a formidably large cycle for solo piano and I'm a bit split on how I feel about it.  On the one hand, there are a lot of entries in the cycle that are spectacular but Martin draws on Debussy and a variety of non-jazz composers to such a degree that jazz-only fans would likely not recognize any jazz influence.  Martin might be thought of as making music that sounds too far away from any kind of jazz mainstream to be recognized as such.  That's not really what I feel on the fence about the Martin cycle, even though I like a lot about it and want to write about it some more.

I think it's more that, put simply, it's harder for me to remember specific preludes and specific fugues.  The sheer technique of contrapuntal writing is there in Martin but I'm not always sure he's got hooks.  By contrast, Kapustin's fugues might not be nearly as polished and he might cheat a bit in terms of contrapuntal textures here and there but he played enough jazz and studied it enough that even  if the fugues as fugues can get diffuse or sprawl they start off with solid, memorable hooks most of the time.

You, dear reader, might reach drastically different conclusions and that's partly why I want to share playlists so that you can hear the works for yourself, if you're so inclined.

Karen M Rice has done a dissertation on this cycle, University of North Carolina in Greensboro, 2009.
https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Rice_uncg_0154D_10128.pdf

Henry Martin, 24 preludes and fugues,
first half,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAbSPsjN5YY&list=OLAK5uy_l_daaoNPYN6nqjNqpUF8jIVMDeuY0Ji7c


Henry Martin Prelude & Fugue Nr 13 in G-Flat Major - A Slow Drag
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWzGZspu6I

second half
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLCDtMyChGE&list=OLAK5uy_n1a7cVpFNKNGD4JtzZIOgTBwk7x-78uWw