Reading Lichtenwanger

I am reading William Lichtenwanger’s “Henry Cowell, Composer of Music.” The first couple of pages concerns itself with Cowell’s native intelligence. (Apparently, he might have been a botanist if he’d had a solid academic foundation.) The opening epigraph features a Copland quote wherein he states that Cowell “discovered” tone clusters. Preposterous. Every toddler that ever reached up and banged a pudgy fist on a keyboard invented clusters. From what I can tell, however, Cowell did have the courage of his convictions. He wrote New Musical Resources very early (apparently “borrowing” some ideas about metrics) and wrote music accordingly. What I want to know about Cowell is why he is so important to the American music that followed him. (Of course, the answer to that question cannot be confined solely to an investigation of Cowell himself or his music. We must look at the composers to whom Cowell was important.)

Lichtenwanger leads off by reminding us that Cowell was more interested in sound variety than great originality:

[Cowell] would have argued that his desire to ‘live in the whole world of music’ led him to create patterns of sound in which great musical originality was less important than a variety of sounds and interesting results.

This quote appears to be out of sync with the story Cowell tells about himself. When he was young, he practiced hearing music in his head, even multiple lines. He noticed over time that music would appear in his mind not of his own construction, but unbidden. With effort, he found he could force these moments. This does not appear however to support the idea that Cowell was satisfied with “interesting results.” Anyone who labors to invite such inspiration is more than tinkering. Cowell himself voices his disappointment at finally writing down and playing these ideas. “Could it be,” Cowell asks, “that this rather uninteresting collection of sounds was the same as the theme that sounded so glorious in my mind?”

The foregoing is perhaps just quibbling, but Lichtenwanger does do something that is significant to our understanding of Cowell. He uses psychologist Howard Gardner’s “seven frames of mind” to present a picture of Cowell that attempts to treat this unique intelligence in a holistic way, one which sees an individual’s “scientific” tendencies and artistic tendencies as members of a spectrum.

Jazz in Public Places

As a blossoming musicologist specializing in American music, especially jazz, I am particularly sensitive to public performances of jazz. One thing that years of grad seminars have taught me is that the messages in our environment are almost always scripted. As I sit in a popular coffee and pastry establishment drinking coffee and listening to the jazz coming through the speakers above and behind me, I am thinking about the choices being made in the programming.

I notice something consistent: every track is a small group, anything from a trio to a quintet; it is all firmly in the bebop and hard bop mold, but usually toned down tracks; players on these tracks rarely exhibit the rasping tone that pushed jazz into an expression of culture and protest as it did in the 60's. The tempi do not stray far from a comfortable finger snap on the half note. It is the kind of jazz that is not threatening and allows casual listeners to identify "jazz in the background" but draws no more attention to itself than provide a patina of cool.

In my opinion, the appearance of jazz in this context is a kind of postmodernist repurposing of culture. In other words, jazz doesn't signify the meanings invested in the music by its creators; rather, the music provides an atmosphere, one that perhaps conjures romantic beat-inspired fantasies of hanging out in dark dens where jazz was once actually played.

This is further problematized by the realization that the appearance of jazz in coffee shops and bars had more to do with an economy of jazz in which players found themselves providing the soundtrack to the public's Friday night out, the only viable alternative when real concert venues were few and far between. Jazz's early repugnance to "respectable" classes arose from the economic exigency of employment. Early twentieth century bordellos, juke joints and roadhouses paid. Unfortunately, the associated stigma of those modes of employement kept musicians in low paying club scenes for years, more for the purpose of selling cocktails than expressing the artistic inclination of its musicians. And here, today, through recording, they sell not cocktails but coffee and paninis.