1900-1920s

Yale University

Spring 2003

This seminar will undertake critical reading of the earliest commentaries on jazz (including the writings of musicians, literary critics, educators, the popular press, and artists (especially the Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists), and of the first attempts at jazz history. Discussion will include the dates and characteristics of the earliest jazz, the role of race in jazz commentary, and the place of jazz in twentieth century discourse. Recordings and films will supplement the readings.

REQUIRED READINGS:

Chevan documents the musical literacy of early jazz musicians in order to debunk romantic notions of "primitivism" in jazz. Even as jazz first emerged as a distinct musical form, its leading musicians had to read music as well as improvise.  Reading music was essential to understand the variety of styles they absorbed and incorporated and to function in any professional situation they found themselves in.

Miller argues that Caribbean music is central to the emergence and development of jazz. The Caribbean islands were a crucial transfer point to the mainland United States for African rhythms and musical forms from the beginning of the slave trade until the present. Caribbean music was especially important in the development of jazz in New Orleans, America's Caribbean city.

This article explores the historiography of early black music and its legacy. In examining texts from the 19th century to the 1940s, Ramsey finds that black music has always been a fertile source of controversy-and that the same issues still resonate in current debates. He takes as his starting point the cleavage between "cosmopolitan" and "provincial" outlooks, which viewed American music from a European perspective, or a more resolutely and defiantly American one, respectively.

Pickering examines Stratton's popular blackface routine in late 19th century Britain. He argues that Victorian society defined itself as modern and civilized vis-à-vis a stereotyped racial "other"-yet also cynically suppressed awareness of the brutal colonial oppression attending its growing empire. Stratton made "visible for his British audiences what was otherwise evaded or concealed ‘inside themselves'."