Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz 9781350203426, 9781350203457, 9781350203433

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz
Abstraction
Conditions of music
Adorno and jazz
Modernism
Recording
Notes
1 The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions and Rags
The word (and problems of definition)
Jazz
Music as modernity
The essential and the hybrid
L’art nègre
Sheet music and performance
The emergence of nascent jazz in Europe
Notes
2 Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting
Orpheus
Jazz modernism
Montmartre to Puteaux
Jazz abstraction, and jazz as art
Dance and new rhythms
Kupka
Painting machines and jazz
Hot jazz
Le Jazz
Notes
3 Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image
Rhythm and proportion
Dionysian jazz13
Orphic cubism
Orpheus/Orphism
Orphic jazz
Sonia and Robert Delaunay
Charles Delaunay
Apollinaire’s perspective
Illumination
Ideograms, sounds, words
Picabia and music
Duchamp and words
The Armory Show: New York 1913
Gabrielle Buffet
Gleizes
Picabia rendre Paris
Notes
4 Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm
La Musique est comme la Peinture
Combs
Duchamp’s objects
Improvisus (more words on improvisation)
Kandinsky’s improvisations: America and the Orphic spirit
Arthur Garfield Dove (1990–1946): records and painting
‘Gramophoning’: materiality and meaning
Willard Huntington Wright
A rhythmic synaesthetic diversion (via China and Greece)
Notes
5 Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond
Duchamp’s painting
Encore à cet astre
Askew: A doodle and a Derridian diversion
New objects
Part 2a: Objects
Part 2b: Gesture and rhythm
CODA: Fabienne Verdier
In praise of hands
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Improvision

i

ii

Improvision Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz Simon Shaw-Miller

iii

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Simon Shaw-Miller, 2022 Simon Shaw-Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image © National Gallery Prague, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-0342-6 978-1-3502-0343-3 978-1-3502-0344-0

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

To Lindsey, whose improvisation with me keeps me we. For the rhythm of our life together.

v

vi

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz 1 2 3 4 5

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions and Rags Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond

Index

viii xi 1 16 52 95 144 215 293

vii

Illustrations Cover image František Kupka, The Keys of the Piano (Lake), 1909, oil on canvas, 78.2 × 72 cm., © Prague, National Gallery. 1.1

[San Francisco] Bulletin, 5 April 1913, an article by Ernest J. Hopkins entitled ‘In Praise of “Jazz”, a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language’

16

1.2

‘Original Rags’ by Scott Joplin, piano score, 1899

29

2.1

Jacques Villon, Le cake-walk des petites filles (trial proof), 1904

63

2.2

František Kupka, Nocturne, 1910

66

2.3

František Kupka, The Keys of the Piano (Lake), 1909

67

2.4

Marcel Duchamp, Flirt, 1907

69

2.5

František Kupka. Solo of a Brown Line, 1912–13

72

2.6

František Kupka, étude pour La Douceur de vivre, 1933

77

2.7

František Kupka, Jazz-hot No. 1, 1935

79

2.8

František Kupka, Jazz-hot No. 2, 1927/1935

79

3.1

Sonia Delaunay/Blaise Cendrars, La prose du transsibérien et de la petite jehanne de france. Couleurs simultanées de mme delaunay-terk

106

3.2

Francis Picabia, Negro Song I, 1913

123

3.3

Francis Picabia, Negro Song II, 1913

124

3.4

Albert Gleizes, Composition for Jazz, 1915

130

3.5

Francis Picabia, Udnie (Young American Girl, The Dance), 1913

132

3.6

Stacia Napierkowska performing one of her dances, 1910

134

3.7

Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), 1913

135

4.1

Francis Picabia, La Musique est comme la Peinture, 1916

145

4.2

Diagram showing the effect of electrical fields on alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) radiation

148

4.3

Francis Picabia, Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz/Foi et Amour

151

4.4

Francis Picabia, Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait

151

viii

Illustrations 4.5

ix

Francis Picabia J’ai vu et c’est de toi qu’il s’agit, De Zayas! De Zayas! Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin

151

Francis Picabia, Voilà Haviland (La poésie est comme lui), Portrait mécanomorphe de Paul B. Haviland

151

4.7

Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille americaine dans l’état de nudité

151

4.8

Marcel Duchamp, Comb, 1916

158

4.9

Music box with comb, cylinder and detachable handle

158

4.6

4.10 Contemporary mbira (thumb piano), 24 keys, Zimbabwe

159

4.11 Arthur G. Dove, Improvision, 1927

168

4.12 Arthur Dove, Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, 1927

170

4.13 Arthur Dove, Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, 1927

171

4.14 Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929

183

4.15 Frontispiece, A. W. Dow, Composition: A series of exercises in art structures for the use of students and teachers

191

5.1

Marcel Duchamp, Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star), 1911

224

5.2

Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914, 1913–14

227

5.3

Marcel Duchamp, Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the Sun)

229

Christian Ducasse, photograph taken at the concert at La Villette, Paris, 1 July 1997

234

5.5

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1964

238

5.6

Nam June Paik, Zen for Walking, action with a violin on a string

244

5.7

Lee Krasner, Night Light, 1949

254

5.8

Lee Krasner, Untitled, c. 1948

255

5.9

Norman Lewis, Magenta Haze, 1947

255

5.10 Lee Krasner, Mosaic Collage, c. 1942

258

5.11 Norman Lewis, Baulé Mask, 1935

261

5.12 Norman Lewis, Jazz Musicians, 1948

262

5.13 Norman Lewis, Jazz Band, 1948

264

5.14 Norman Lewis, Magenta Haze, 1947

265

5.15 Norman Lewis, Study in Blue and White, 1954

265

5.4

x

Illustrations

5.16 Photo of Adderley’s music stand taken during recording of Kind of Blue, 22 April 1959

269

5.17 Fabienne Verdier painting, still photograph from Fabienne Verdier: flux, Philippe Chancel’s film of Verdier’s work for Rome’s Palazzo Torlonia, 2016

276

5.18 Fabienne Verdier, Cadence, 2016

278

5.19 and 5.20 Still photographs of Fabienne Verdier drawing from Mark Kidel’s film The Juilliard Experience, 2016

280

Acknowledgements As so often when I write, I have in this book been guided by the shadow of another work. In this case the marvellous The Life of Forms in Art by Henri Focillon. While this model (never reached) lives quietly behind the ambition of my book, it only comes to the surface in the final chapter, but it is worth acknowledging here its silent contrapunctus underneath my text. I also want to thank two great libraries for the space and site to work. This book was drafted in a nine-month period in the University of Cambridge Library. This wonderful trove of resources allowed, like no other library, the casual conversation between texts that was necessary to form my ideas as I wandered between the ground and sixth floor (music and art). Without the serendipity of this open-shelf library the task of writing and the particular rhythm of ideas herein would not have been possible. I am equally indebted to the Bodleian in Oxford, but in this case not for its single space but for its many spaces. Because it was while I was on a Visiting Research Fellowship at Merton College that I finished the full draft. Merton’s generosity of both practical support and of spirit, collegiality and warm welcome, made a space for reflection which accounts for many of this book’s positive points, while being in no way responsible for its failings. My own institution, the University of Bristol, also deserves thanks for allowing me to step back from my department and university duties to concentrate on scholarly endeavours. I am most grateful to my colleagues in History of Art for their support during my year and a half of writing. My gratitude also to the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury for their support, recommendations and gentle criticism of the first draft (and the final submitted draft), and to my students who were exposed to sections of the work in the process of its evolution. A special thank you also to Professor Michael Tucker, who first introduced me to the currents and complexities of jazz while I was an undergraduate many years ago in Brighton. ECM have been a constant companion ever since! My mother, who was born in Fitzgerald’s ‘jazz age’, also deserves special mention for her steadfast support of my various scholarly endeavours, even when she wasn’t quite sure in what they consisted. Thank you! And gratitude and thanks to my beautiful daughter Aniella for your love and for sharing this wonderful world of art and music! The images, which, for an art history book, are always more than necessary, have been hampered by copyright and costs (which accounts for some unfortunate absences), but I have also received individual generosity and kind support. Where some enquiries and requests went unanswered, others were met by swift and magnanimous goodwill. My thanks to The Association for Art History who gave a small grant to help cover some of the illustration costs. Additionally, the University of Bristol offered help through Professor Martyn Powell, Head of the School of xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Humanities, and the Faculty of Arts Research Committee, both of whom were generous in providing funds to meet some of the additional cost of images. In the early stages Victoria Coules helped in establishing contacts and getting some important images. In the final, and most complex stage, my wife Lindsey worked diligently and thoroughly to get everything through, tying up all loose ends. So as always with my writing, I owe a great debt to her, not just because of her work on the images, but because she read the text, discussed the ideas and helped smooth the bumpy prose. Editor, interlocutor, partner. Lindsey, this improvised noodle is for you.

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz

In 1964, the novelist and critic Ralph Ellison brought jazz, improvisation, and art into alignment: There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a context in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity, and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.1

This dialogue with identity and expression, that Ellison saw as central to the condition of jazz, is also linked to the condition of modernity. That he should compare this to the visual artist is likewise related to modernity, because within this ideology the paradigm of music as a cultural model for art (indeed, the ‘condition to which it aspires’) is central. I have discussed this in considerable detail in previous books, Visible Deeds of Music and Eye hEar The Visible in Music. What I shall explore in this book are affinities within this condition, filtered through the model of jazz. This is not a book on the history of jazz, nor is it even a history of the relationship between jazz music and art influenced by it, or by its musicians. This book is mainly concerned with what we can call an emergent jazz sensibility. No musical form emerges from nowhere, fully articulated, it slowly becomes visible and evolves. The period addressed is likewise complex. While what can be called ‘Enlightenment modernity’ (to be discussed in Chapter 1) is rooted in the European enlightenment project, Kenneth Hudson has suggested that the second phase of industrial modernity, in the first half of the twentieth century, was centred in America. What the current book is concerned with is the impact of modernity on European artistic sensibilities, but also how this idea folded back and, through a reciprocal transatlantic manoeuvre, lead to the fertilization of American artistic culture with ideas from European visual modernism. Given the governing paradigm of purism that characterizes certain key notions of modernism, notably those around descriptions of medium specificity, I want to propose here a more synthetic, hybrid or bricolage species of modernism, one that plays a vital role in the polyphony of modernist binary drives. ‘Jazz modernism’, as we 1

2

Improvision

might call it (to re-apply Alfred Appel’s term),2 promoted certain formal and ideological priorities within discourses of modernity which I wish to emphasize. I am aware that much can be said about this topic in the 1930s and 1950s, and others have focused on this. It may seem perverse to some that I do not discuss Léger (except in passing), Marinetti and Dada more generally, Stuart Davis, and only touch on Abstract Expressionism through a couple of its least well-known practitioners, Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis. In the process of writing, the ideas in this book pushed in other directions. Likewise I do not address the fascinating relationship between jazz and photography, two art forms that emerged at much the same time, and that danced together in both popular and artistic manifestations. My concern is with jazz and abstraction, with painting and markmaking. In the classical music tradition, the rise of the concept of absolute music challenged the ephemeral and spontaneous, and instead promoted the full score with fixed parts and the work-concept.3 While there is of course traffic between these extremes, the models they represent offer different ‘conditions’ to which other arts might aspire or emulate. At precisely the time Pater was writing ‘all the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art [for] . . . all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, on 21 November 1877, on the other side of the world, the condition of music was being revolutionized by the words ‘Mary had a little lamb’, spoken by the inventor Thomas Edison to demonstrate a new device which could both record and play back sounds.4 Edison’s phonograph changed the ‘condition of music’ in ways unimaginable to Walter Pater, and it was jazz music which became its most immediate beneficiary, developing a complex and contradictory relationship with recordings. The discussion of Arthur Dove forms a bridge between the Orphic European sensibility, that moves painting towards abstraction via the model of music, and the technology of musical recording. Dove’s aesthetic critically engages the concept of recording, integrating it into the rhetoric of abstraction, via the act of painting from jazz records, in ways not managed by a European artist. The focus of this book is on a less direct, less explicit manifestation of the jazz spirit. I wish to expose the ideological links between what was to blossom into jazz and modern art’s aspiration to the condition of music. Howard Rye has pointed out there ‘is no clear dividing line, either in fact or in public consciousness, between the minstrelsy of the 19th century and those forms of Afro-American music which have been known since 1920 as jazz and blues’. He goes on, in relation to Britain, ‘visiting entertainers were presenting music with distinctive Afro-American content from the middle of the nineteenth century’.5 This investigation is not to establish a simple binary of influence, but to show something subtler; something of the way in which notions of creativity in different fields, painting and music-making, shared sensibilities even when that sharing was not explicit. Improvisation is central here, but so is an attitude towards the importance of rhythm and gesture across art forms. Improvisation did not of course start with jazz, most musical cultures have improvisation and even in European classical music there is a long and rich tradition: discantus in medieval singing, diferencias in Renaissance string music, préludes non

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

3

mesurés in seventeenth-century keyboard and lute music, the tradition of basso continuo and continuo realization in music of the Baroque. In Classical and Romantic music there are cadenzas in concerti and the like, there are impromptus and fantasias, bel canto solos, Romantic organ improvisations, and then aleatoric and graphic musical practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Composers from Bach (and before) improvised as part of the compositional process. Mozart, Paganini and Liszt often improvised in public, later transcribing (or not) their ideas on paper. But what jazz itself did, to a higher degree than classical music, was to develop this creative tradition into real-time group compositions. Today jazz retains its place as a global site for musical traditions and avant-garde practices to play together in a mutual, respectful space. In part, what emerged is a difference of emphasis within these conditions. It might be characterized as that between propositional knowledge (absolute music) and procedural knowledge (jazz). The latter requires a contextual approach that moves away from the erroneous assumption that writing (notation) equals rigour, while ‘practice’ is just a skill or the occupation of technicians. Equally erroneous is the proposition that improvisation is more ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’, a simple form of natural expression requiring no knowledge, just instinct. Rather, the fluid relationship between these ideas will be explored. More will be said on improvisation throughout the book, especially in Chapter 4.

Abstraction My main concern is not musicological, I am more interested in engaging jazz ideas as a way of thinking about early ambitions to abstraction in art. In doing this I consider abstraction as a term which relates to a process defined by degree, and not to be confused with its cousin ‘non-objectivity’, which conceptually aspires to a type of Platonic idealism. As Samuel Kootz characterized it in 1943, abstract painters use ‘existing reality as a point of departure . . . and insists upon a close attachment to lifeimpulses’ whereas non-objective artists ‘attempt to find perfection in geometry alone’.6 Stark though this may be, it allows us to see ideas of abstraction as related to jazz in the common use of variation, extraction and development from existing materials, as points of departure for improvisatory evolution. In relation to abstraction and the art of the black diaspora more specifically, as Phillip Brian Harper has put it, ‘the principle of abstraction . . . has routinely been marshalled against black persons and populations within the American context (as throughout the West) in both cultural and social-political terms’. He goes on, ‘With respect to the former, abstraction has largely comprised a mode of genericization whereby the specificity of African-American historical experience – and that of other minoritized populations too, for that matter – has been precluded from the representational field, and its value and significance thereby tacitly rejected.’7 Abstraction tends to generalize what it sometimes perceives as ‘universal’ experiences or characteristics, in the process of arriving at formal solutions to specific artistic problems, often showing scant awareness of the experiences of those outside its

4

Improvision

purview. If abstraction is a contested term, no less so is jazz itself, particularly in relation to its function as part of black cultural expression. Paul Gilroy writes, ‘There are many good reasons why black cultures have had great difficulty in seeing that the displacements and transformations celebrated by [Miles] Davis’s work after “In a Silent Way” are unavoidable, and that the developmental process regarded by conservatives as cultural contamination may actually be enriching or strengthening.’8 While Gilroy is specifically addressing the Wynton Marsalis versus Miles Davis debate,9 his broader point is significant: that there are, however oversimplified it may appear, typically two views of black music: an essentialist and conservative one (Marsalis), which sees the music as a primary way of exploring the essence of blackness; and a more pluralistic position (Davis) that assumes no such organic or unifying essence. Gilroy proposes a solution to this opposition through the idea of a ‘changing rather than an unchanging same’.10 The gift of ‘syncretic complexity’, to borrow Gilroy’s phrase, is what feeds the condition of music, as I propose it in what follows. This is also, of course, to perceive intertextuality as fundamental, although this is not a simple or transparent concept. I take it as an approach that builds on the critical position of Roland Barthes, who challenges the position of authorial and textual singularity: ‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.’11 Indeed, jazz is essentially and explicitly intertextual, and in this way constitutes a critical series of threads in the web that forms modernism itself. As recently as 2014 the jazz critic and author Stuart Nicholson complained, ‘Considering the wealth of modernist theories that have been published in recent years, especially from the perspective of literature and visual art, there have been relatively few attempts to explore modernism’s relationship to jazz.’ He goes on, quoting Jed Rasula, ‘jazz unquestionably informed modernism as intellectual challenge, sensory provocation, and social texture’.12 I cannot address this entire lack here, nor is it my aim, but I want to point to how complex such a study might be, by addressing just a small part of it. Before going further, I want to expose a few ideas, central to jazz beyond the concept of improvisation and central to the theoretical foundations of music as a model for early twentieth-century art, that will be threaded throughout the following pages. The concept of rhythm in jazz is a play between pulse, meter and rhythmic elaboration that results in swing/groove. This was succinctly summed up by Joost Van Pragg as early as 1936: ‘Swing is a psychic tension that comes from the rhythm’s being attracted by the meter.’13 A few years later, in the early 1950s, the French writer André Hodier emphasized that swing is the result not just of tension, but of the relationship between tension and relaxation; the latter is a characteristic he regards as central and which he rightly identifies as psycho-physical and therefore can only be ‘grasped intuitively’.14 Art’s analogue is the importance of the brushstroke as a unit of expression, a unit which carries a heightened signification in a non-figurative context. Jazz also tends to emphasize musical timbre (colour) over formal complexity (although the latter may also exist). Such timbral emphasis, together with technique

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

5

and style of performance (mode of attack, breath control, physical deportment, etc.), results in the ‘voice’ of a performer, the production of a recognizable individual ‘style’. It would be stating the obvious to say that abstract painting promoted colour as an independent signifier. Within jazz there is also an emphasis on the significance of musical gesture within the dynamics of improvisation, which is to be understood as both physical, and as a description of phrasing: the real-time structuring of melodic and harmonic elements. It is a musical form that privileges process over text in performance: therefore gesture, physical embodiment, and ‘intuitive’ creative decisions; ‘music as a creative act rather than as an object’ as Charles Keil has put it.15 Moreover Keil, who critically adopts Leonard Meyer’s vocabulary from Emotion and Meaning in Music, has argued that while the ‘basic’ formal unit of music in the Western classical tradition is the ‘sound term (phrase)’, the basic unit of jazz is ‘gesture (phrasing)’. Further, while the former is composed and the latter improvised, the process of communication, which is an integral part of this process, must be understood as not just musically but physically gestural: ‘[Ray L.] Birdwhistle, [Edward T.] Hall and others have demonstrated that a vast amount of communication is non-verbal, bodily and largely unconscious.’16 It follows that the key difference here is the role of performance, and that aesthetic engagement itself need not, or should not, restrict itself to the verbal; a bodily aesthetic might more suitably be required. The importance of the ‘feel’ (or ‘engendered feeling’ as Keil describes it) of jazz can be extended to the ‘feel’ (engendered feeling) of abstraction; the process of mark-making and the evolution of form, as it emerged in the early twentieth century. As Keil points out, ‘I suspect as do other critics that we admire many modern painters – Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky, Miro, Chagall, Pollack (sic) – more for their sophisticated childishness than for their maturity. Many modern jazzmen, notably Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Charles Mingus are equally serious about being infantile.’17 Play is the key concept, in both its creative and performative aspects.

Conditions of music There are many ‘condition(s) of music’, but the one to which Walter Pater referred in the late nineteeth century, when he first characterized this aspiration, was forged from the coin of absolute music. This idea emerged in the late eighteenth century, in tandem with the standardization of musical key and temperament and the idea of the composer as the exclusive locus, or ‘author’, of musical ‘works’. This can, in turn, be seen to have genesis in music’s aspiration to the condition of visual art, seeking to consolidate its status above a form of entertainment (beautiful, but trivial, as Kant put it in the Third Critique, applying the term angenehm).18 Music did this by focusing on the production of a central object in the guise of the score, or, more abstractly, in the ‘work’, as Lydia Goehr helpfully characterizes it,19 through the prism points of the imagination and pen of the composer. However, once music had gained a nominal formal abstraction, it became, in its turn, a model for the development of modern art’s most significant teleological aspiration and revolution: the development of non-figuration in painting. Such abstraction was a turn from the world of objects to the representation of states, a challenge to the place and

6

Improvision

conception of mimesis. Visual abstraction is closely associated with modernist formalism, through the criticism of Clement Greenberg and his assessment of modernism’s central characteristic as truth to specific material composition. In the case of painting (the art form at the forefront of modernism in his view), that is the material or medium of paint, ink, etc., and the physical support, the canvas, paper, etc. While Greenberg did not simply argue for abstraction intrinsically, he did propose it in opposition to the notion of the decorative (an argument also made by Kandinsky, as we shall see), and as something that differentiates it as ‘high’ art. This positions abstraction, purity and high art on one side, and craft, popular art and kitsch on the other. It is worth spending a little time with Greenberg’s important essay on this topic, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ of 1939, in which he makes the distinction between ‘mass’ and ‘superior’ culture through the establishment of an aesthetic hierarchy, as this has significance for ideas in ‘jazz’. In this relatively early essay, Greenberg identifies the avant-garde as one of the few remaining oppositional cultural forces in modern society. The commodification of ‘authentic’ culture by capitalist societies needs to be resisted by the artist, for it is this absorption that produces kitsch: ‘Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely.’20 On the one side there is T.S. Eliot and Braque, on the other a Tin Pan Alley song and a Saturday Evening Post cover: ‘All four are on the order of culture . . . Here, however, their connection seems to end.’21 Thus, seen by Greenberg, modern culture propels two poles: the avant-garde and kitsch. Another seeming ally in this battle for culture was the English art critic Clive Bell, who had, seventeen years earlier, explicitly attacked jazz at the conclusion of his book on modern visual art, Since Cézanne (1922).22 In this essay within his explanation of ‘jazz theory’ (‘if theory there be’),23 he also draws Eliot together with ‘Tin Pan Alley’, but he laments the fact that the great poet had been influenced by ‘the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse’.24 Through his boldly stated racism and snobbery, he nevertheless registered that Eliot was happy, at this stage, to acknowledge and celebrate his love of the vernacular, even if Bell was not. Eliot was happy to rag his rhythms in verse, as he does in his syncopated extra syllable, ‘that Shakesperian rag’, in The Waste Land.25 Thus Eliot plays off his American identity, and in doing so falls on the side of, if not kitsch, then populism.26 Yet jazz’s threads of connection to wider aspects of modernist culture cannot so simply be disentangled, however hard one might try, and many did. By the late 1920s, rejecting jazz was as de rigeur in European intellectual circles as, contrarily, adopting it had been in the teens. But its rhythmic, improvisational, visceral hooks were firmly rooted in European modernism, and Bell’s prognosis ‘Jazz is dead – or dying, at any rate – and the moment has come for someone who likes to fancy himself wider awake than his fellows to write its obituary notice’, was premature to say the least. Jazz was far from dead, although it was evolving, changing and mutating, and its modulation to a modernist art music was underway. Salman Rushdie has explained, in defence of his novel The Satanic Verses, that newness always seeks identity in mixture. ‘Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.’ So it was with jazz. Rushdie ‘celebrates

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

7

hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.’27 This is especially true of the ‘new’ as it characterized itself in modernism, specifically the strain of modernity that sought synthesis rather than separation – a jazz modernism, for jazz too came from ‘change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining’.28 This modernism is not that of the twentieth-century’s ‘apostles of purity’, to use Rushdie’s phrase. This is what jazz offered as a paradigm, as Norwegian saxophonist Hakon Kornstad has put it, [jazz] ‘has to absorb influences from other music styles, like it has always done, because it is a mixture of music, a “bastard music” ’.29 The model of modernism’s ‘condition’ thus has two faces, a mongrel and ‘pure-bred’ one, one of improvisatory spontaneity and one of serial control, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. But they are two faces from one head. However boldly expressed, these concepts are not to be understood as opposite, but themselves intermingled, two sides of the same coin: in the guise of Apollo and Dionysos both are children of Zeus. Peter Sloterdijk’s re-reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871), points to them as inherently dialectic, with neither one valued more highly than the other. Sloterdijk’s reading rightly sees Nietzsche’s dramatic theory as a foundational text of modernity. Schulte-Sasse points out in his forward to Sloterdijk’s analysis: What determines the nature of aesthetic representation in modernity most strongly is the fact that a mode of representation enlightened by the basic tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian can no longer claim to be a mimetic one. A split subjectively can even less be ‘imitated’ (i.e. objectively portrayed for an individual), than ‘reality’, since the relationship between subject and artistic object serves as a mirror in whose image the subject reflects his or her own constitution – a constitution that by definition cannot be ‘had’ in a unified image.30

This is why music is such a potent paradigm for modernism; the split evident in the nature of the paradigm. It is ironic, for Greenberg’s reading of modernism and his view of Jackson Pollock as a ‘pure’ painter, that the synergies between Pollock’s drip paintings and bebop can reasonably be established at a technical level, no less than with ‘free jazz’, as Ornette Coleman himself recognized. However, the painter’s own musical tastes were less for the ‘art music’ end of jazz and more for the ‘Tin Pan Alley music’ so despised by Greenberg, Bell and others. Part of the purpose of this book is to draw the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ closer together, to show a hybrid, intertextual dimension. In addition to raising the spectres of Greenberg, Bell and Nietzsche in relation to jazz we should also briefly mention Adorno as part of the theoretical introduction to this study.

Adorno and jazz ‘Über Jazz’ was written by Adorno in 1936, under the delightful pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler. It is not his only word on jazz, but what he says about jazz remains

8

Improvision

remarkably consistent, even in the face of a diverse and developing world of jazz music.31 He nevertheless displays a relative ignorance of the American features of jazz, relying on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mátyás Seiber for matters of jazz technique. Adorno’s unwillingness to see invention in jazz demonstrates a conceptual intransigence focused on a false sense that repetition excludes invention.32 In On Jazz (the English ‘on’ not quite capturing the ‘overtones’ of the original German), Adorno lives up to his nom de guerre, firing directly on jazz, although his use of the term means something closer to Greenberg’s Tin Pan Alley than the way it is deployed throughout this book. Arguably, in the 1940s and 1950s (after most of Adorno’s jazz essays), jazz modulated into a form of art music as Rock and Roll took over its position as ‘popular music’. Consequently, its intimacy with the culture industry weakened. There is indeed some confusion here as to the musical material that was available to Adorno. J. Bradford Robinson has argued that the jazz to which Adorno had access was not African-American, but the mix of salon, march and big band jazz that dominated the Weimar Republic.33 However, much of the essay was drafted in London, where, according to Evelyn Wilcock, Adorno experienced ‘authentic’ jazz. She cites a letter to Horkheimer, where Adorno mentions going to a ‘black night club’ in Soho. She suggests a number of possible clubs where, in each case, important jazz musicians performed, including Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie.34 However, if Adorno did hear such musicians first hand, his subsequent analysis demonstrates a far less distinguished engagement with the particulars of their music, than it did with the particulars of, say, Mahler, Wagner or Schoenberg. In essence, Adorno’s critique of jazz is part of a much wider project to critique the culture industry. The key points boil down to issues of degree: the degree of ‘real’ freedom found in improvisation; the degree to which rhythmic nuance does, or does not, deviate from an underlying beat, etc. Adorno claims that no real improvisation exists in jazz, instead its musicians work with formulas and stereotypical variation; the surface may shift, but the structure remains rigid. Rhythm is much the same; while syncopation gives the impression of modification and displacement, the fundamental beat is rigorously maintained, emphasized by the bass drum. According to his own categories, jazz was ‘rhythmic-spatial music’, to be contrasted with ‘expressive-dynamic music’;35 that is, according to his argument, jazz lacked any real dialectical development within its internal relations. Instead, what we find is an underlying repeated structure that has ‘ornamental’ elements superimposed on it. This homogeneity is indicative of the collective, the authoritarian, the worst of mass culture. There is an isomorphism between musical and social processes here; the musical and the social reflect each other. Just as individuals, through social forces, undergo development (biography), and in turn through their mutual relations bring about social change (history), so musical motives undergo variation and development (in, say, sonata form) which in turn lead to the development of the whole work (sonata). In such form the dialectical development of relations has consequences and antecedents which are causally linked, even if they are ultimately constrained. For Adorno, Beethoven is the composer par excellence of this, in that he both diagnosed and exemplified the dawning crisis of modernity in its subject–object rupture. His

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

9

revolutionary development of musical language plays out this fragmentary bourgeois subject and does not permit a false reconciliation. Schoenberg’s atonality takes this further by depriving the listener of any schema: ‘traditional music was stamped through and through by the schema of tonality; it moved within harmonic, melodic, and formal paths that were pre-drawn by this schema’.36 The driver in this is harmony. Rhythm is subservient to harmonic relations for Adorno, so it is no surprise that jazz is seen by him as locked into an outmoded metric-harmonic schema. Jazz is an ‘art’ of effects and formal clichés, not of organic or developmental coherence. The key question is, what is this ‘jazz’ to which Adorno refers? In as much as Adorno describes an anodized European imitation of AfricanAmerican jazz, he raises significant points. He opens ‘On Jazz’ by saying how difficult jazz is to define, but then goes on to provide a ‘crude orientation’: a type of dance music that has a decidedly modern character, and that this quality resides in ‘sound’ (what we can call ‘timbre’ and rhythm, not harmony and melody). ‘Syncopation is its rhythmic principle.’ While some (‘virtuoso’) pieces ‘yield an extraordinary [rhythmic] complexity’, most maintain a beat emphasized by bass drum. In terms of a modern use of timbre, he claims this is caused by excessive vibrato that destabilizes the tone, but no more disrupts it than the beat is disrupted by rhythm, so the vibrato ascribes subjective emotion to a note (in its ‘excess’), while not interrupting the basic sound pattern (its ‘rigidity’). Such characterizations are less helpful in understanding innovative AfricanAmerican jazz. Such criticism is hard to sustain in the face of, say, Louis Armstrong’s famous stop-time solo on the 1927 recording of ‘Potato Head Blues’, which is also not the standard 12- or 32-bar tune by which Adorno tends to characterize jazz. In short, Adorno sees jazz as a straightforward product of the culture industry, not as a form of individual creative expression. For him, any aspiration to self-expression is ultimately supressed by the weight of the culture industry; individuality is reduced to the status of a cog in a machine. As Robert Witkin sums up: ‘Those elements in which immediacy appears to be present – the improvisatory moments, the varieties of syncopation, and so on – are added to the rigid commodity form in order to mask it but without ever gaining power over it’.37 Adorno critiques the idea that jazz represents a revivification of the modern through genuine contact with the primitive. Jazz is a modern commodity, it is not African in origin but drawn from the experience of slaves, ‘the domesticated body in bondage’.38 Originality and individuality are squeezed out of jazz by the repetitive, ‘just like all the others yet original’. Adorno takes very little account of the culture of jazz performance, where there is a reflexive fine-tuning into the sensibilities of colleagues and musical context, and improvisation is integral to this. Is improvisation formulaic or expressive? It is both. The musicologist Paul Berliner has argued that small ensemble improvisation counters Adorno’s argument in the productive tension between individual and group, in which personal musical expression takes place in a community of mutual respect.39 Hal Foster sees both Greenberg’s and Adorno’s approach as ‘formalist avant-garde’, in their attempts to save art from what they regard as its debasement by mass-culture kitsch.40 At issue in both Greenberg’s and Adorno’s essays is the nature of consumption: how does ‘kitsch’ or ‘jazz’ produce its effects? The central problem here is the level at

10

Improvision

which detail is engaged. There is no specific engagement with jazz production or consumption on its own terms. Adorno does not specify particular works, because they are all, in his view, interchangeable. However, jazz is not simply synonymous with popular music, despite its close relationship to it when Adorno was writing. If, as is argued, the culture industry feeds off the creative energies of truly creative artists – it needs grist for its mill from somewhere, as it does not invent, it just reproduces – then this space of aesthetic creation outside the culture industry is precisely where jazz first emerged. And it emerged from a creative hybridity, a collision of cultures, races and classes, not from a pure point of origin; it was born from a conversation, one initiated by black Americans. Indeed, the close relation of jazz to popular music, folk music, aspects of Western classical music and ‘world’ music, is simply a mature example of its native condition. Furthermore, this process of interaction is not a one-way street. Hybridity spreads and alloys in every direction. The products of the culture industry can be the stuff of creative experiment (in pop art for example), and they make cultural production available across a broader zone, a capacity increased by digital forms of distribution. Even if this process sometimes produces a compromised version of the original, it can still carry spores that find fertile ground in the margins, where new forms are born.

Modernism Like jazz, modernism is no fixed category. It was, and is, a site of contest, debate and disagreement, but the modern moment it seeks to describe, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, is categorically marked by a crisis in representation that functions on many levels. In addition to operating at a structural, artistic level (as an issue within the forms of artistic expression), this crisis is also manifest at the level of race. Here the contribution to modern culture of the black Atlantic, to use Gilroy’s rich phrase, is fundamental. In the guise of ‘high modernism’ the story therefore becomes more complex. This is especially true when the character or condition of that modernity is inflected through the model of the ‘classical’ musical paradigm. Andreas Huyssen has argued that modernism was marked by a ‘conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other’, pursued simultaneously with ‘an increasing consuming and engulfing mass culture’.41 In other words, while some cultural commentators claim to be repulsed by otherness, the allure and magnetic attraction, especially of the black, sexualized body as represented by jazz and popular culture, proved compelling for many. But rather than seeking the separation that Huyssen does, between the historical avant-garde and modernism, I see this as a problem interior to modernism. The distinction between art and kitsch is not simply a distinction of type, as Greenberg has it, but of degree. Modernism and the avant-garde may be defined in relation to conventional, academic or bourgeois art on the one hand, and vernacular, popular or mass culture on the other. However, the division is not clearly cut. If one of the issues I have pursued previously is the difference between what I have called ‘Formal Modernism’ and ‘Contextual Modernism’,42 the former strongly rejecting the popular while the latter is happy to play with it, here I want to recast this distinction.

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

11

In doing this, it is helpful to step back a little from the micro level of differentiation between modernism, post-modernism, meta-modernism, neo-romanticism, etc., and appreciate the inherent complexity of modernism itself. By considering the interplay between jazz and ideas of modernism, we can appreciate how complex are the currents that flow through twentieth-century culture. The critique of high-modernism as ‘élitist’, or a clash between American dislike for, and a simultaneous attraction to, old European high culture, and the retaliations of reactionary conservatism to the avant-garde, these have sometimes been deployed to replace modernity with its post, but these challenges are also part of modernism itself. The complexity of modernism’s DNA is as much written by Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis as by Schoenberg or Stockhausen; by Kandinsky as much as Duchamp. If, for example, even the arch-modernist composer Brian Ferneyhough has sought a rapprochement between post- diatonic complexity and chance, then the same could be said of much jazz-group improvisation. ‘The other day, someone spoke about the processes utilized by Stockhausen, about his excitement at certain things coming to pass almost without his personal participation, once he had set them in motion. I imagine the “dialogic” relationship as being somewhat along the same lines, but with a great deal of additional, momentary and context-bound subjective input.’43 While acknowledging and utilizing the binary codes of modernism, I also want to question their facile adoption. As Bruno Latour has argued, while this notion of ‘classical’ modernism asserts the power of binary oppositions, it also acts to presume there is no contradiction. To focus his words more specifically on the realm of culture, ‘As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization . . . we become retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work in the historical period that is ending.’44 To pursue this binary tension for a moment longer, I see two strains in emergent modernism pulling in opposite directions: one a purism towards ‘truth to materials’ that seeks formal autonomy, the other a drive to artistic synthesis, towards a Gesamtkunstwerk (at least as an aspiration or goal), that seeks contact and hybridity. Music operates as a paradigm for both strains of modernism, with the aspiration to absolute music on one side and the ‘artwork of the future’ on the other; thus, purity and synthesis. Jazz is a provocative model, precisely because of the ways it moves between and across this divide. Jazz provides the opportunity to revisit the twentieth century and move through its currents to a different tune; a tune played to, and in part by, visual modernism, to cross another border or divide. It is not simply an issue of recasting Peter Bürger’s historical avant-garde,45 because the influence of a jazz-inflected modernism does not divide along such simple borders. The example that jazz offers is not that it provided access to the vernacular, or to black American culture, although it did both of these. More importantly it provided a theoretical model in the sense of deriving ideas that were trans-artistic (and transAtlantic), some of which were manifest in practices. Jazz highlights improvisation, realtime making, in dialogue with materials, in rhythm, and through gesture. One other key tension here is that between opsis and melos. While I have worked to draw these two together in my other work, here I want to use jazz as a lever for further closing the gap. The importance of gesture in the role of improvisation is important,

12

Improvision

because it signals towards another co-performer, or to the audience, inviting participation in the making of the ‘work’. The same might be said of the gesture in painting, the open mark, the stroke that hopes for enactment from the viewer; internal, imagined, heightened by abstraction. This may in addition be seen as directed to the life of the body, rather than the life of the mind. As jazz plays against the separation of the body and mind in the improvisatory act, so the gesture shows the body in the mark.

Recording As the simultaneity of Pater’s statement and Edison’s invention makes clear, jazz is emblematic of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.46 It is an art of performance or praxis which can only be captured by recording, not an art of the score and lexis, as classical music is. However, this condition for jazz is also always incomplete. While the distribution and understanding of jazz is increased by recording, the raison d’être of jazz is the live performance, where change is invited. While the concept of improvisation is complex, and will be discussed in greater detail later, what it does signify is a willingness to allow the ‘work’ to emerge from a community of intersubjective interactions, in real time. As Benjamin notes, ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.47 This may be true of the physical objects of visual art, but jazz does not fit comfortably with Benjamin’s characterization. Its complex relationship to the technologies of sound reproduction is evident in its dynamic binary state of oscillating inside and outside recording sites. So jazz has grown up with recording and has been, in part, constructed by it, but also fashioned by live performance and the real-time interaction of the community of performers and the audience. It sits as awkwardly with Benjamin’s argument as it does between the poles of purism and synthesis. Mechanical reproduction similarly sits in a playful relationship to Duchamp’s ready-mades, especially in L.H.O.O.Q., but while the unique ‘aura’ is destroyed and remade by Duchamp, so each jazz performance remakes, uniquely, the ‘work’. Indeed, it is around this questioning of the ‘work’ that Duchamp and jazz dance. In what follows I want to resist a reductivist account that simply places jazz on one side of the modernism and avant-garde divide. Indeed, it is indicative of jazz that it should maintain a hybrid refusal to sit only on one side of any fence. In Chapter 1 I consider the emergence of jazz music, including ragtime and the cakewalk, along with questions of definition, its emergence into European culture and the idea of black Atlantic transmission. Chapter 2 turns directly to deal with this background against the emergence of abstraction in Orphic painting, especially in the work of František Kupka. Chapter 3 looks at the contribution of other Orphic painters, Sonia and Robert Delauany and their jazz critic son, Charles; the Italian Severini; the tension in Orphism between opsis, melos and lexis; and then Picabia, Duchamp and the migration of these ideas to America via the Armory Show in 1913. The discussion of Picabia is developed in Chapter 4 before turning to the impact of such Orphic ideas in

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

13

America, specifically through the work of one artist, Arthur Dove. Running through this discussion is the tension between the organic, embodied senses of modernist rhythm and the beat of the machine; the theoretical complexity of rhythm as an artistic concept; the theoretical contribution of Apollinaire and the theoretical and practical contributions of Kandinsky. Chapter 5, the final chapter, more explicitly brings Kandinsky’s contribution to the fore and links him to Duchamp and their mutual interest in the ‘object’ of art. The role of the object in both the ready-made and the theatre of abstract expressionist painting is considered in the conclusion, as is the traffic between Eastern and Western ideas of rhythm, which extends the theme of movement between Europe and America and the embodied nature of improvisational creation, not least in the work of Nam June Paik. By way of a coda to the whole book, the discussion is brought into the twenty-first century and back to France and summarized through a brief consideration of the wonderfully choreographed, embodied, gestural painting of the contemporary artist Fabienne Verdier.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14

R. Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, [1964] 1995), p. 234. A. Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (Yale University Pres, 2004). See L. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford, 1992). The phonograph, as the word would imply, was first thought of by Edison as a dictation aid, its musical possibilities were only later realized. H. Rye, ‘Fearsome Means of Discord: Early Encounters with Black Jazz’ in Black Music in Britian: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. P. Oliver (Oxford University Press 1990), p. 45. S. M. Kootz, New Frontiers in American Painting (New York: Hastings House Publishing, 1943), pp. 49–50. P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York University Press, 2015), p. 4. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 97. See for example L. B. Brown, ‘Marsalis and Baraka: an essay in comparative cultural discourse’, Popular Music (2004), vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 241–55. Ibid, p. 101. R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans S. Heath (London: Fontana Press), p. 146. See S. Nicholson, Jazz in a Global Age (Northeastern UP, 2014), p. 155. Also J. Rasula, ‘Jazz and American Modernism’ in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. W. Kalaidjian (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 157. J. V. Pragg, ‘Etude sur la musique de jazz’, Hot Jazz (January 1936), quoted after A. Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York, 1956), p. 196. By ‘psychic’ here I would ‘translate’ as the unconscious process of mind and body interaction (known and felt). Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, p. 197. He regards this ‘relaxation’ as racially distinctive – a characteristic ‘naturally’ found more often in black musicians than white (see pp. 206–7).

14

Improvision

15 C. M. H. Keil, ‘Motion and Feeling in Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 24, no. 3 (Spring, 1966), p. 338. 16 Keil, ‘Motion and Feeling in Music’, pp. 337–49. Also R. L. Birdwhistle, Introduction to Kinesics (Louisville, KY., 1952) and E.T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York, 1959). 17 Ibid, p. 347. 18 Kant (1790), see Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1952), pp. 195–6. 19 L. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992). 20 C. Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 11. 21 Ibid, p. 3. 22 It was first published the year before in New Republic (1921), as ‘Plus de Jazz’, pp. 92–5. 23 C. Bell, ‘Plus de Jazz’ in Since Cézanne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), p. 225. 24 Ibid, p. 222. 25 But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag – It’s so elegant So intelligent “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? “What shall we ever do?” The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

See also D. E. Chinitz, T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 43. However, later, with his conversion to Anglicanism and adoption of British citizenship, Eliot too sought to distance himself, like Bell and Greenberg, from jazz and the popular. S. Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 394. See ibid, p. 394. Quoted after S. Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead?: Or Has It Moved to a New Address (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 151. P. Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (foreword J. Schulte-Sasse, trans. J. O. Daniel), (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xiii. See Essays on Music (selected and introduced by R. Leppert, trans Susan H. Gillespie) (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002). This is not to recognize that inventiveness necessarily depends on repetition and re-inscription as a condition for communication, an issue we shall discuss in relation to Derrida’s conceptualization of improvisation in Chapter 5. J. Bradford Robinson, ‘The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany’, Popular Music, vol. 13, no. 1, (Jan. 1994), pp. 1–25. See E. Wilcock, ‘Adorno, Jazz and Racism: “Über Jazz” and the 1934–37 British Jazz Debate’, Telos, vol. 107 (Spring, 1996), pp. 63–80.

Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries

15

35 See Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1980). 36 See, Adorno, ‘Towards an Understanding of Schoenberg’ in R. Leppert (ed.), Essays on Music (California University Press, 2002), p. 629. 37 R. W. Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz’, Sociological Theory, vol. 18, no. 1 (March 2000), pp. 145–70. 38 ‘On Jazz’, translated by J. Owen Daniel, Discourse, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 45–69. 39 P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago University Press, 1994). 40 H. Foster, The Return of the Real: Art Theory at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996). 41 A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1986), p. vii. 42 S. Shaw-Miller, ‘Modernist Music’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. P. Brooker, A. Gasiorek, D. Longworth and A. Thacker (Oxford University Press, 2010). 43 B. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, ed. J. Boros and R. Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995), p. 155. 44 See B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 11. 45 P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 46 W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 217–51. 47 Ibid, p. 220.

1

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions and Rags

Ragtime is a certain type of syncopation and only certain tunes can be played in that idea, but jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune. Jelly Roll Morton

Figure 1.1 [San Francisco] Bulletin, 5 April 1913, an article by Ernest J. Hopkins entitled ‘In Praise of “Jazz”, a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language’.

Part 1 The word (and problems of definition) In the beginning was the word . . . or perhaps the sound, or the sign.1 I shall start with the word (sounds and signs will be discussed later). Ernest J. Hopkins gave over the whole of his usual column ‘What’s Not in the News’ to the discussion of what he identified as a new baseball term, ‘jazz’, precariously balancing the concept on 16

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

17

his nose (Figure 1.1)! Although it was a term that was first applied in a baseball context, Hopkins’ discussion is chronologically placed between the first uses in relation to sport a year or so earlier, and the word’s first written application to music.2 This first application to music appears to have taken place on Sunday, 11 June 1915, when Gordon Seagrove wrote an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on the new music being played in a Chicago club entitled ‘Blues is Jazz and Jazz is Blues’.3 This column conflates the two types of music, swapping them over and demonstrating that both involve the insertion of what the article calls ‘sour’ notes (presumably flattened 3rds, 4ths, 5ths and 7ths, etc.) into ‘standards’. Importantly, it is noted that the addition of these harmonic shades is made during performance: ‘The blues are never written into music but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren’t new. They are just reborn into popularity . . . The trade name for them is “jazz”.’4 The article goes on ‘There’s a craze for them now. People find them excellent for dancing. Piano players are taking lessons to learn how to play them.’ The key idea here is that jazz is improvised in performance, music is added to by the player, it is not simply a matter of ‘playing the notes’. The effect is to add an energy, spirit and harmonic tension to the music, an impulsive, spontaneous quality, so the relevance of the adoption of a sports term to the syncopation and upbeat nature of the new music is not hard to see. Hopkins picks up the association of jazz with life, vigour and joy, as others would do. He sees it as linked to the future, it is modern, he describes it as a ‘Futurist’ word (with no mention of the Italian movement of that same name). He also picks up on the ‘musical quality of the word’ itself, its onomatopoeia (this is before its application to music). It is a word possessing its meaning in its sound, an electrical current, and it looks modern too; a modernist word possessing this quality in a neat package of sight and sound. It is also an alterable word (from the Latin alter, ‘other’), in both its meaning(s) and in its reference(s). As we shall see, jazz was attractive to the European musical and artistic avant-garde because of its alterity. It came from the outside, from AfricanAmericans, it was therefore simultaneously conceived of as modern and primitive, Janus- faced. For ‘modern’ white American artists (like Dove), it was additionally both of and not-of their sense of being a modern American. In these terms we must remember that cultural alterity is not, of course, fixed, it does not represent static or intrinsic attributes or characteristics. It is dynamic, active, performed. It is in the character of the word jazz that it is in constant dialogue with itself and other musics. Jazz might therefore be best understood to represent a concept that is defined in relation to a discourse; a system of conceptual interrelationships. It sites a place, as John Szwed has pointed out, ‘at which a number of texts converge and where a number of symbolic codes are created’.5 It is a centre of gravity, a force. In the year I first drafted this chapter, the Norwegian jazz trio led by the pianist Helge Lien, with Per Oddvar Johansen on drums and Frode Berg on double bass, released an album entitled Guzuguzu (Ozella Music, April 2017).6 This is music that explicitly plays with the idea of onomatopoeia, with the musicality of language (related, as we shall see, to Derrida’s unknowable ‘trace’). But their music is not based on the musical quality of the word ‘jazz’ itself. Typical of much contemporary jazz (especially European jazz), their collective improvisations are multi-culturally focused, in this case on a set of Japanese terms and the rich field of association they open up for musical

18

Improvision

improvisation. The album was recorded in a series of single takes (although the ideas were explored over a much longer time), in order to keep the performance close to the experience of live improvisation. The core of the music developed through improvisatory trio performance based on Lien’s initial musical ideas, which was then related to the onomatopoeic titles post-performance.7 Music in this way preceded language. ‘Nikoniko’ refers to the ‘sound’ of a smile; arpeggiated and gently flowing music here relates to a word, which refers to a sight and a feeling. ‘Lurukuru’ is a term for spinning around in circles. ‘Chokichoki’ means cutting, and ‘Guzuguzu’ itself means ‘moving slowly’. That a Nordic jazz trio should play with Japanese words in relation to musical improvisation, in what many regard as an American art form, is itself emblematic of the journey that jazz has taken in the hundred-odd years between its coinage in the United States and the release of this recording by these Norwegians.8 My intention here is not simply to rehearse etymological debates over the meanings of the word ‘jazz’, nor to chase it back to some supposed point of origin, but if one thing is clear from a cursory etymological survey, it is that the word and concept ‘jazz’ are wonderfully mutable. In the various stories of its birth it has moved across possible points of derivation, ranging from proper nouns (prominent here is Jasbo Brown, the Chicago musician, c. 1919), across supposed African or Arabic origins (respectively, ‘jaz’ meaning to speed things up, and ‘jaz’ a root of various Arabic words including ‘jazib’ and ‘jazibiyah’, meaning ‘charm, grace or beauty’), to possible French words such as ‘jaser’, as in ‘chatter’, ‘talking together’ or ‘gossip’. French, African and Arabic roots resolve in Creole. Jazz also had a potential root in sex slang. The adding of jasmine oil to turn-of-thecentury New Orleans perfume was referred to as ‘jazzing it up’ (here we have another coincidental connection to Helge Lien’s Guzuguzu, where the only track not based on a Japanese onomatopoeic word is the central track ‘Jasmine’). Connected to this usage, through the perfume’s association with the red-light district in New Orleans, was ‘jazz’ as a synonym for sexual intercourse. More well-known perhaps is the connection between ‘jazz’ and ‘jasm’ (cited as early as the 1860s) as a term for semen. In the UK, ‘spunk’ as a slang expression for semen, dating from c. 1880, also relates to the same meanings as jazz: spirit, courage and energy.9 That the word was closely associated with the body is significant, either in the guise of sport or sex, its transgressive nature attached it to the idea of excess of energy, allowing it to move across to a musical form that, in its early years if not latterly, manifested the same characteristics. Whatever the word’s origins, the meaning has always been transgressive. It may well have taken hold as a term due to its multiple roots. What can now be called jazz – ranging across, for example, the music of Masabumi Kikuchi, E.S.T., Christian Wallumrød, Anouar Brahem, Abdullah Ibrahim, The Bad Plus, Marilyn Crispell, Collin Walcott, Marcus Stockhausen, Jason Moran, Dino Saluzzi, etc.10 – is no longer, necessarily, linked stylistically to what might have been called jazz in the early decades of the twentieth century. The word is definitively transgressive, culturally and musically, and I would wish it to remain so. This fundamental plastic nature was initially evident in its spelling (e.g. jas, jass, jaz, jasz, jascz, jazz). In its slippage across possible languages of origin (African, Arabic, French), its application to sport, sex and finally to a type of music, the meaning at no point stands still. I would go so far as to suggest that, as a contemporary category, jazz

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

19

now signifies a meeting place for a variety of musical languages, a place where folk, classical, popular, experimental and world musics meet, and most often in a mutual space of improvisation and conversation (as expressed in the quotation from Jelly Roll Morton at the head of this chapter).11 There are some who would still protect a more limited definition of jazz.12 Such essential definitions have the advantage that they consolidate an identity by relating current practice to a continuity or tradition, but they also have the disadvantage of performing a disservice to the hybrid origins of jazz, and they replace the diversity of musical languages with a coherent, easily comprehensible narrative that makes of it a parallel to the similarly problematic term ‘classical music’. There is an ambition to purism and essentialism here that to my ears sounds strangely anachronistic and at odds with the historical flexibility of jazz as a concept. This is to take up the position of so-called New Jazz Studies in questioning the idea of a coherent and unproblematic (‘natural’ or ‘organic’) tradition.13 This book will explore the tension between hybridity and purism as it plays out in modernism. To offer a short definition outside the wider questions of ontology, I suggest that jazz is a musical form founded in African-American musical culture (that is, already hybrid), that celebrates spontaneous real-time composition (improvisation) and timbral distinctiveness, and plays with rhythmic development against metric organization (what is sometimes called groove or swing, the ‘timing’ of musical gestures). In asserting the hybridity of jazz, it is important to acknowledge that all constituents of hybridity are not necessarily equal, and that this might function both structurally and ideologically. It is not, then, simply that mixture is the issue, but rather the values attached to the elements of the mix. That one part of the mix might be positioned as ‘primitive’, the other ‘sophisticated’, produces a particular ideological relationship. The nature of the hybrid needs consideration, not just the fact of it. Nevertheless, perhaps the definitive site of this mixture is in the performance of the music itself, as Herbie Hancock has said: What I was trying to do and what I feel they [the 1960s Miles Davis quintet] were trying to do was to combine – take these influences that were happening to all of us at the time and amalgamate them, personalize them in such a way that when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other.14

In a context of improvisation, mixture is constantly being re-blended and brewed. My focus on Europe should not be seen as a binary to America (or to Africa). Europe is not a ‘bleached continent’, to use Paul Gilroy’s phrase, but rather a postcolonial, ethnically hybrid site, and jazz continues to grow from a complexity of cultural exchange, not from a spurious notion of purity: black or white. There is some lively debate still raging in jazz criticism about ‘tradition’, ‘progress’, ‘authority’ and even who may and who should not be a member of the ‘jazz club’; do you have to be American, or black, or both? I do not want to become embroiled in these same debates, but it should be clear that I intend to focus on hybridity, not essentialism. I want to engage jazz in a European context precisely because jazz continues to be seen by many as

20

Improvision

solely American.15 While the concepts jazz and modernity were originally conflated with America and notions of the modern, the role of jazz outside America is consistently underplayed, or at worst, ignored. This is, then, partly an issue of how jazz adheres to notions of modernity. Indeed, as we have seen, it is not just ‘modern’ jazz (post 1940s) that is modern. Jazz was modernist from the off. But this modernity is not singular, as we mentioned in the ‘Introduction’. In its first phase it was linked to its antipode, the ‘primitive’, a complex binary that involves interiority as well as national identity. Slavoj Žižek writes: What characterizes the European civilisation is . . . precisely its ex-centered character – the notion that the ultimate pillar of Wisdom, the secret agalma, the spiritual treasure, the lost object-cause of desire, which we in the West long ago betrayed, could be recuperated out there, in the forbidden exotic place. Colonization was never simply the imposition of Western values, the assimilation of the Oriental and the Others to the European sameness; it was always also the search for the lost spiritual innocence of OUR OWN civilization.16

Significantly, the concept of jazz can also be seen to migrate across other borders. One of these that is fundamental to ideas of modernism is that of the ‘line’ between lexis and melos. Onomatopoeia is an early example, but this is not a claim that onomatopoeia represents a point of origin.17 Rather, I am emphasizing Hopkins’ 1913 point about the modern sound of the word, but adding that it also, especially in its now accepted spelling, looks modern, and this slippage between the worlds of sound and sight is indicative.

Jazz The slippage between opsis, lexis and melos is also fundamentally evident in the imitation of voice in improvised instrumental solos; in calls and responses as dialogical musical processes, as forms of musical conversation, but more fundamentally in the vocabulary and gestures of expressive (improvised) solos. This is explicit in the socalled mouth-trumpet as played by Cliff ‘Ukelele Ike’ Edwards (1895–1971), for example, and the technique of singing through a wind instrument. ‘When pitch inflections are combined with speech-like rhythmic cadences, soloists sometimes actually “sound like they’re speaking words”.’18 It is also evident in the nonsense ‘words’ of scat singing, which commonly utilise non-morphemic syllables, a form of sound poetry that evolved in ragtime and early jazz, concomitant with Futurist and then Dada experiments, often in imitation of instrumental sounds. In the jazz context, scat can be seen to be linked with West African musical traditions, to cultures of tonal languages,19 and to talking rhythm or drums. That musical instruments ‘talk’ is an idea that seems only metaphoric in a Western context of equal temperament. As Paul Berliner has put it, in much African music ‘the human voice and instruments assume a kind of musical parity’ being ‘at times so close in timbre and so inextricably interwoven within the music’s fabric as to be nearly indistinguishable’.20 The word jazz itself blurs

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

21

the ‘pure’ distinction between sound and meaning, between music and the so called extra-musical. Most significantly, jazz music itself is fundamentally liminal, slipping across geographical boundaries, musical genres and racial identities. This is not, of course, to deny its fundamental identity as a cultural product of black Americans, rather it is to stress its essential hybridity, it is explicitly a music of mixture, and a celebration of that mixture, African and European, brought about first by African-Americans. This multiculturalism flows through the history of jazz. In Charles Garrett’s Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century, he highlights the figure of Jelly Roll Morton, a Creole musician21 ‘who has always been a thorn in the side of conceptions of jazz as black and white’, to propose that understanding jazz as a transnational or global phenomenon enhances our understanding of jazz history.22 If its origins are transgressive and hybrid, it has remained so, for in the second century of its existence it is clearly a global phenomenon, no longer simply an American art form but a truly international one, in which the processes of influence travel in every direction. As the jazz historian Ted Gioia has it, its contemporary character can be described as ‘increasingly marked by the assimilation and celebration of national, regional and local elements’.23 One final objection needs to be addressed in relation to periodization. It may be felt that the following discussion does not much engage jazz ‘proper’, because that did not emerge until at least the 1920s. In what has been argued so far, I hope it is evident that what I am principally interested in is an emergent sensibility, one that was coming to define itself, and that this sensibility was also evident in a very different guise in visual art: in improvisation, rhythm, timbre, colore, gesture. It is not therefore an issue of simple influence, rather the struggle to discover a sentiment of modernity, one in tune with its times as the nineteenth century slipped into the twentieth. Jazz is an affinity I seek to uncover, rather than an influence as such. I suggest an affinity between the emerging musical sensibility that is or was to be ‘jazz’, and the struggle to achieve nonfiguration in painting. It is the application of the idea of the condition of music as a paradigm for this struggle of abstraction, that fills the interstices between these two. Jazz is not, then, a term that signifies a style of music, but is rather a term that delineates a musical discourse: a point or a prism through which a number of codes, influences and ideologies creatively collide and mingle. ‘Musical’ is not used simply to signify sound, for jazz is not just a sound, any more than any other music, it is a practice, a discursive practice, understood in Foucault’s sense as a practice of communication founded on rules that define and construct the referents (they do not simply expose them). Jazz is a space or context in which meaning, and significance, are a consequence of social and aesthetic action, and that musical action is consequent upon interaction, rather than simply being present in the sounds (notes, etc.) themselves. To think of it as a discourse is to be aware of its hybrid makeup. Jazz is effectively a space of disputation in its relationship to other music and other aspects of modern culture. Jazz is constantly disputed in terms of its borders. I am less drawn to that question than I am to the resonance of this hybridity, seeing it as potentially paradigmatic for central characteristics of artistic modernism. Through its challenge to traditional cultural, social and aesthetic categories, jazz was as avant-garde as abstraction: Louis

22

Improvision

Armstrong’s musical improvisation was as much a blending and conversation with ideas of tradition and spontaneity as was Kandinsky’s painterly one; both artists made real-time compositional decisions while aware of overall structural design; both traded between this disegno and colore; and both regarded gesture as central to expression.

Jazz dans l’Europe: binaries Jazz is usually presumed to have broached European shores, and found a home in France in particular, with the influx of American soldiers at the time of the First World War. While this is in large part true, setting the date around the summer of 1917, the seeds that blossomed into jazz had been sown much earlier. A jazz sensibility was seeded through both touring American minstrel shows in the nineteenth century and solo performers, such as Pete Hampton (1871–1916), who recorded dozens of songs in London from 1903 to 1911 and who had an outstanding blues harmonica style;24 the Chicago ragtime singer Belle Davis (recorded in London in 1902); the early scat singing of African-American Ashley ‘Bob’ Roberts in duet with the white singer Charlie Manny, recorded in 1915 (HMV, ‘All Night Long’, B-521); and the stride piano of African-American duo Carlyle and Wellman, who recorded in London in 1912. In addition to individuals and minstrel shows, so-called ‘coon’ shows, and African-American choirs (who sang spirituals among other things – for example the Fisk Jubilee singers, who were recorded as early as 1909) also toured widely.25 There were musicians touring as part of African ‘tribal’ shows, Nigerian groups for example, who were highlighted through national exhibitions of colonial power, and who visited cities as diverse as Cork, Berlin, Helsinki and St Petersburg. Both African and American culture was therefore resident in Europe for a number of years before their impact on modernist culture became clearly evident, and, it should be noted, before their music was ever recorded in their home country. While jazz was born in America, its coming to Europe was almost concurrent, and its recording, an acknowledgement of its importance, was ahead of its American adoption. However, the anthropologically inclined French citizen might have sought ‘first hand’ contact with indigenous peoples more directly, in the nineteenth century, by attending the third Exposition Universelle of 1878, through the ignominious and racist establishment of a ‘human zoo’.26 Among those ‘exhibited’ were Zulu dancers, who later also appeared on the stage of the Folies Bergères. Recordings of tribal peoples from Sénégal were made as early as 1900 following the Paris World Fair. Thus, a vocabulary emerged that allowed a comprehension of what was to become jazz. Many of the racist stereotypes that characterized French culture’s encounter with a variety of black cultures can be seen to aggregate in the stars of the very fashionable Nouveau Cirque on the rue Saint-Honoré: the clowning double act ‘Footit et Chocolat’. They were George Footit, a white Englishman from Manchester with a circus family background, and the black Cuban ex-slave Chocolat (whose real name, according to his death certificate issued in 1919, was Rafael Padilla).27 Their act was promoted by Joseph Oller, who was both the founder of the Nouveau Cirque and the manager of the Folies Bergères, for over fifteen years.28 Their act exploited their racial and cultural differences and played to the contrast between their characters, although the tables

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

23

were occasionally turned to comic effect. Stereotypically Footit adopted the guise of the active, witty and bullying one, while Chocolat played the put-upon one, a slow simpleton, despite the fact that this ‘simplicity’ was demonstrated on stage through a fluency in both English and French, manifested in his malapropisms and misnomers. Together they acted out the visual and verbal signification of racial and colonial difference, and this made them popular subjects of illustration, not least by the artist Toulouse-Lautrec. Both Footit and Chocolat can be seen in his lithograph Le Cirque,29 which was first published in La revue blanche30 in January 1895. In this image, surrounded by an audience of caricatured bourgeoisie, Footit is shown in the typical act of giving Chocolat a swift kick to the backside.31 Lautrec plays the same joke by offering the viewer a horse’s backside on the right. Away from their act, however, the image is rather different. Lautrec captured the ‘off-duty’ image of Chocolat in the ink drawing ‘Chocolat Dancing in the Irish American Bar’ (1896). This famous establishment was situated at 33 rue Royale, where the poised and more dignified figure of Chocolat is shown dancing a jig for his own amusement, accompanied by a figure on the right who plays what looks, anachronistically, like an ancient lyre, but which thus lends an air of classical poise to the composition. Chocolat’s raised, highlighted right hand, forms a reversed distant echo of Adam’s in Michelangelo’s famous creation gesture, but here the genesis is of a cosmos of hybridity. To quote James Smalls: In this establishment, all present would dance and sing ‘to the sound of a banjo and mandolin, played by an Englishwoman and her son, whose father had been a Texan mulatto’. The bartender at the left of Lautrec’s image is identified as Randolph (known as Ralph), a man of mixed racial background (Chinese and Native American), born in San Francisco, and who garnered a reputation among habitual clients of the establishment for mixing elaborate alcoholic concoctions. The hybridity or métissage of such company and such acts speaks to the combined fluidity and critique of racial, cultural, and class boundaries so typical of the period and so dear to Lautrec’s sensibilities as a modern artist.32

Chocolat’s representation also plays on the minstrelsy tradition. Smalls again: ‘Chocolat Dancing relies on the metonymic nature of minstrel performance and the stereotype that plays upon the slippages of difference and desire, fear and fascination, horror and amusement. This was the relationship with black people to which French audiences of the fin de siècle had not only grown accustomed but had expected.’33 This continuity of hybridity travels through to jazz. It is against this background that the cakewalk (a dance that might have recalled Chocolat’s ‘loose-limbed walk’), and that precursor to jazz, ragtime, were first introduced in 1902 at the Nouveau Cirque, with the opening on 20 October of Les joyeux nègres (The Happy Negroes). While this was not an atypical vaudeville show, with its mix of sketches featuring, among other things, a pickpocketing dog and a boxing match, all held together on a thread of song and dance, its most noticeable feature was the introduction to the Parisian audience of the cakewalk, which immediately captured their imagination. One

24

Improvision

reviewer wrote: ‘Nothing could be more original, more lively, or more agreeable to the eye than these new cakewalk dances.’34 The look of the dance here makes the greater impact, rather than the ragtime accompaniment which remained unmentioned. This is typical; the contortion of the performer’s movements (arms extended horizontally, hipthrusting, high knee steps, etc.) were the most visually noteworthy (opsis). To compound this submerging of the music (melos), references to the cakewalk and ragtime were frequently used interchangeably. Both were often also used as synonyms for anti-art, being wrongly perceived as entirely free from structure and rules; that is, until they became more familiar, and both were codified in scores and dance manuals, and thus received the imprimatur of lexis. L’Illustration (1903), for example, referred to the cakewalk as ‘the wildest frolics’ which was performed according to the dancers ‘fancy’ and without ‘preliminary practice’. ‘No rules really exist.’ The rags that accompanied them were ‘bristling with countermeasures and syncopations’, a ‘noisy conglomeration of sounds’.35 The fact that they were performed with confident gestural ‘swing’ created the impression of felt improvisation, their difference a barometer of their ‘random’ nature.

Black Atlantic rhythm A number of other modernist tropes appeared in the wake of what some saw as the American invasion of these new sights and sounds.36 The dances and music were contrarily described as variously ‘frenzied’,‘strange’ (so strange as to be alien or medically suspect: ‘epileptic’), but at the same time ‘captivating’, and these same characteristics were either therefore seen as signifiers of authenticity and therefore positive, or as signs of danger and negative. Consequently, most of these debates took place in relation to their impact on French cultural identity. The importance of this has been dealt with by others37 and I do not want to get caught up in binary debates about good or bad influence, the main point here being that such oppositions and contradictions existed. While some debates of modernity posit a pure point against which mixture takes place, such a characterization fails to recognize that no such unsullied temporal moment every really existed; waters not only run deep but are also muddy. Paul Gilroy points out that as black cultural forms such as the cakewalk, ragtime and jazz travelled across the Atlantic, they formed a ‘counter-culture’ within modernity, that nevertheless interacted with European culture, which was itself a modernity of mixture, and in turn made of European modernism an amalgam.38 He approaches the diaspora as not so much as a model of separation from a source or origin, but rather as a state already characterized by hybridity. African-American culture can paradoxically represent both a jazzy American modernism, and at the same time an African ‘native primitivism’, while not being reducible to either. It is the tension between this bifurcation that is interesting. Some commentators, such as Matthew Jorden in his important study Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (2010), have argued that these two discursive regimes operated as separate entities; ‘two imaginary constructions of difference which recurred in French discourse and culture: American modernity and nègre primitivity’.39 Others see the same primitivism as counter to the inauthentic machine age. However, jazz’s hybridity holds both within the same ideology. Indeed, it holds this tension in its

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

25

heart (in its pulse), in its DNA, in the musical material itself, for it is fundamental to the structural workings of the concept of rhythm. Rhythm and its cognates are complex, and will be discussed throughout the book, and in detail in Chapter 5. Rhythm is the element that stretches, compresses, anticipates, denies, predicts, ignores and pushes and pulls the temporal feel. Rhythm is thus equated with the body, the organic, being looser, lop-sided, unpredictable and animate. Thus, the concert between the pulse of the heartbeat, the less regular stress of the gait, and the irregular interaction with the environment, are all played out in the music. Beat, and its stressed manifestation in metre, is equated with mechanization, being regular and unrelenting, while the actual rhythm, which is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for beat, is in fact the temporal play above, with, and against this beat and metre. It was both the power and impact of the rhythm of jazz (stressed in the ‘rhythm section’ of bass and drum kit) and this play in syncopation, accent and push and pull (agogic rubato) that provoked many of the broader cultural responses, both positive and negative, to both its nascent and its more developed forms.

Music as modernity In this way, the ‘biology’ of rhythm links it, in the eyes of some critics, to the ‘primitive’, as harmony might be related to the realm of culture. This is an opposition that reaches back long before jazz, nestled in different times and in subtle variations, like Russian dolls. One of its most distinctive manifestations is in eighteenth-century France, in the disagreements between Rameau and Rousseau over the fundamental nature of music. For Rameau, music was to be understood as a conceptual art, an art of calculation (the mind), based on mathematical laws that obeyed the rules of physics and should be mediated by social control. Rousseau, on the other hand, argues that music was not grounded in the mathematics of harmony, but in the nature of the human voice (the body), in melody and instinctive expression. If music should address the soul and harmonize the social, as Rameau suggested, was this preferable to the excitement of the passions and the pursuit of freedom in expression, as Rousseau maintained?40 This is, in turn, another form of the argument that persisted from Vasari to the eighteenth century and beyond, between disegno and colore; an ideological paragone in which the relative values of line, drawing, design, colour and gesture are at issue. In all cases, however, such polarized debate usually exists only in theory, very rarely are such extremes fully absorbed in practice. Differences between style and ideology exist, of course, but they are usually graded, the differences are rarely as marked as their purist extremes would suggest. In jazz terms, the argument ran along similar lines; was the fun and pleasure of the music (colore), for example, acceptable despite its lower cultural credentials, and did its emphasis on rhythm make it culturally less significant than an engagement with harmony (disegno)? Jazz also had a complex relationship to materiality. This is seen in the two meanings of the concept ‘material’. On the one hand, jazz was a more materially disposed art form than classical music and was more commercially successful. On the other hand, it was also less material than classical music, in that its material (the sound) was endlessly

26

Improvision

variable and shifting, variations on ‘standards’, variability in performance, and even more problematically, its existence without the benefit of a score (no identifiable ‘work’). Thus, jazz was in some ways more ‘ephemeral’ than classical music, for its identity lay in the insubstantial, fleeting transience of performance, in the bodies of performers, rather than in the fixity of the text in a score, or as immutable concept in the mind of the composer.41 This ephemeral perception of jazz is concordant with Charles Baudelaire’s characterization of one side of modernism as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’.42 This view of modernity also stresses temporality in that it offers music as a paradigm, as Baudelaire recognized in his own assessment of Wagner.43 But these characteristics are even more marked in the emergence of jazz, which puts a different music at the centre of modernity as paradigm. It should also be noted, and here I follow Ronald Schleifer, that within the economic shift that brought about such modernity, emotional life was also altered.44 He differentiates Enlightenment modernity, modernism of the post-Enlightenment period, and cultural modernity, modernism of the industrial revolution and after. In cultural modernism, as the capitalist project takes hold, emotion and the experience of the processes of modernization were not so much defined by ‘states’ as by ‘performance’. A key example would be the performative nature of pleasure itself. Schleifer draws on Colin Campbell’s exposition of emergent sensibilities in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, which proposes that the difference between ‘needs’ and states such as ‘satisfaction’, ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ should be considered as follows: ‘the former [needs] relate to states of being and its disturbance, followed by action to restore equilibrium . . . The paradigm for this model is . . . hunger. By contrast, pleasure is not a state of being so much as a quality of experience . . . The paradigm for this model is . . . sexual activity.’45 Thus, Schleifer points out, pleasure is an event, not a thing, ‘and as an event it necessarily encompasses production and consumption, performer and audience’.46 The condition of music that jazz represents is paradigmatic here because it acknowledges pleasure, the body and rhythm, and the necessity of completion through audience. It is a music of event, not of thing. Fullness and identity are, in this way, sought through ‘performance’ and enactment, rather than in the paradigm case of ‘absolute’ music, where identity is rooted in the ‘work’. Thus, as a cultural condition, jazz music signifies in different ways from the cultural condition signalled by classical music. Hal Foster adds to this chronology in what he sees as modernism’s reaction to (besides revolution and war) two great shocks: firstly ‘the heterogeneity of cultural forms that imperial expansion brought to the European metropoles’, and secondly ‘the “scientific management” of laboring bodies that industrial expansion enforced among the working classes. Many modernists felt compelled to address these shocks somehow – to aestheticize them or to accelerate them, to mock them or to militate against them – and often they did so through figures of the primitive and the machine.’47 The important point for the argument here is that jazz was not just one of the new cultural forms (although it was that), it was also emblematic of this very heterogeneity, and it could address and contain both of these ‘shocks’ at the same time, holding them

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

27

within the same discursive space. As Foster puts it himself in a footnote, in relation to Le Corbusier, it was ‘jazz, which seemed to allow a potent mixing of a primordial Africa and a futuristic America’.48 Many early critics saw jazz as the antithesis of absolute music in its connection to the praxis of everyday life, in its relationship to work-songs (attached to slavery), and gospel songs, which were tied to religious practice. As Jeremy Lane has pointed out, ‘jazz promised to overcome the opposition between art and life, escaping the pitfalls encountered by an atrophied autonomous Western high culture’.49 Binary oppositions, as we have been discussing, are never evenly balanced, but always privilege one side over the other (like the stress in the pulse of metre). It should not be supposed that rhythm is primitive, and harmony sophisticated, any more than that black or white cultural identity in these debates is necessarily unitary or immutable. These are consequences of ideology and argument. Ideas of primitivism in relation to this contact with African-American culture, as pointed out above, are both important to, but concurrently in a paradoxical relationship with modernism. The revivification brought to European modern art by contact with what it saw as its ‘other’, provoked questions of social, national and individual identity. Paul Guillaume, the art dealer, wrote in 1926 in ‘The Discovery and Appreciation of Primitive Negro Sculpture’: Before 1905 art in France, and indeed in all of Europe, was menaced by extinction. Five years later, the enthusiasm, the joy of the painters, their fever of excitement, made it apparent that a new renaissance had taken place. Not less evident was it that the honor of this renaissance belonged to negro art . . . there was an entire literature, a whole school of music, which was, at first ironically, named after the negros – a name which they will keep, though the irony has long disappeared. One may almost say that there was a form of feeling, an architecture of thought, a subtle expression of the most profound forces of life, which have been extracted from negro civilization.50

A ‘form of feeling’ and an ‘architecture of thought’. The contribution of jazz to theories of modernism depends on an understanding of these questions of form and architecture, as well as an understanding of their historical context, and key to this architecture is rhythm. As Jody Blake has put it, ‘Events in popular music and dance contribute, therefore, a new and significant component to the well-rehearsed chronology of the “discovery” and appropriation of African art.’51 The interest in socalled ‘primitivism’ in early twentieth-century European culture was accompanied by the sound of jazzed and ragged music.

The essential and the hybrid Ragtime (so-called due to its ‘ragged’ syncopated rhythm) was introduced to Europe via a white performer, the American band leader John Philip Sousa at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. However, less well known, but perhaps the key figure here, was

28

Improvision

the composer Arthur Pryor (1869–1942), the assistant conductor and trombone soloist in Sousa’s band. He both composed and directed the performance of most of the band’s ragtime material. The usual Sousa march had a regular, duple feel. This remained the case even with music that was ‘ragged’, such as the ‘march and two-step’,52 where the time signature was often in the compound time of 6/8, the subdivision retaining a duple feel (123–456), but with a looseness caused by the intrinsic triple pull, producing a characteristic ‘swing’, but with larger gestures over six beats. This was fundamentally different from the rag. Rags are usually in 2/4, the metre emphatically laid out in the bass (left-hand in piano) and with much greater syncopation within the bar, or across it, in the melody (right-hand), which leads to tighter, smaller rhythmic gestures, and hence to the development of one-step ‘animal’ dances, such as the ‘Turkey Trot’, ‘Bunny Hug’ or ‘Grizzly Bear’. While Pryor’s rags were composed with Sousa’s band in mind, and usually included a variety of ‘sound effects’, such as slide whistles, rather like a cycle pump, and trombone glissandi, he was well aware of the precedence on which his species of rags were based. A characteristic example of the core repertoire that was largely invisible to a European audience at this stage would be Scott Joplin’s ‘Original Rags’ of 1899 (Figure 1.2). A brief consideration of the opening demonstrates the key characteristics (section A, of an A, B, C, A, D, E structure). It opens with the following unison syncopation, followed by the regular oscillating left-hand quavers (bar 9), with the right hand tying the semi-quavers across the beat, etc. The subsequent sections vary little in harmonic terms (although there is modulation) and maintain the playing off of the rhythm between the two hands; left hand/right hand division of beat/syncopation. Linked in popularity to ragtime, well into the first decade of the twentieth century, were these one- and two-step dances.53 Initially, the most popular two-step (a variant of the minuet) was the cakewalk, which may have originated as a satire on the ‘uppityness’ of white plantation owners54 – ironic, given its popularity with white Americans and Europeans. One of the most engaging elements of the craze for the cakewalk was the ‘improvisational aspect of this competitive dance . . . (the) latitude for individual invention was considered one of the major attractions’.55 This fundamental interest in improvisation, however, seemed to most Europeans to place it beyond rules. From early on, rhythmic syncopation corresponded with the conception that ‘anything goes’. Improvisation was equated with making-it-up, it was ‘wild’ and ‘free’. Here the idea was that free and wild equalled ‘natural’ and instinctive, hence ‘primitive’. The idea that improvisation might, in fact, be based on real-time invention, founded on an intimate understanding of the correct framework and momentby-moment creative decisions, does not occur within the ideology of primitivism. A further irony, although sadly not surprising, was the fact that with the popularity and spread of ragtime in Paris, the most famous exponents of the cakewalk and ragtime music were the white imitators, such as Harry Fragson56 and Maurice Chevalier, rather than the anonymous improvisatory originators. It is also the case at this time that contact with the ragtime of composers like Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb was limited outside America.57

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

29

Figure 1.2 ‘Original Rags’ by Scott Joplin, piano score, 1899.

One outstanding African American performer, however, who visited London in 1919 is worth mention (and will be discussed further below). Will Marion Cook composed58 Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk in 1898, creating the first musical, both featuring African-Americans and produced solely by them. The dominant paradigm of judgement here was, of course, the European classical model, which represented these new forms as, ‘eccentric’, ‘exotic’ and often ‘comical’. The essence of this critique of the rag and cakewalk is the racist projection of what were seen as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ cultural characteristics, which resulted in the new forms being derisorily referred to as ‘style-less’ or even ‘anti-music’. However, it was precisely the ‘eccentric’ or ‘bizarre’ nature of the new rhythms, gestures and forms (and the importance of improvisation) which were taken by some more radical European thinkers to be models worthy of emulation that might prove ideal for the revivification

30

Improvision

of Western cultural traditions. The anti-historical assumption adopted by both sides of the argument – that these forms existed in a separate ‘natural’ space, and one that emerged from some fundamental primitive instinct – was adopted to promote an essential primitivism, shared by supporters and detractors alike. Within such debate, the tension between ‘purity’ and ‘hybridity’ of expression was regularly raised. What constituted the ‘real thing’ was a topic of considerable argument. In America, as early as 1903 in an article called ‘The True Negro Music and its Decline’, the idea that ‘even poets of the colored race’ were diluting their African heritage by creating ‘false, flippant new songs’ not recognized by a ‘credulous public’ as counterfeit – not ‘the genuine music’59 – demonstrates how fundamental was the idea of a pure (natural) vs hybrid (artificial) opposition.60 However, while for some Americans it was the case that contemporary AfricanAmerican music was a dilution of (however understood) ‘African folk music’, it was felt by others that ‘true Negro melodies’ might, in turn, form the basis of a real and genuine American music. Following the research for the composition of his ninth symphony (From the New World op. 95, B.178), Antonin Dvořák was convinced: that the future music of this country [America] must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.61

This was also an idea supported by some black intellectuals.62 The interesting issue is the vacillation in conceptions of an ‘authentic origin’: is this African, American, or African-American? Primitivism, in whatever guise, represented a real force for the regeneration of European culture, or the development of a truly American one. The beguilingly romantic idea, that Africa represented a pre-civilized nursery for humankind, was often preferred by both supporters of and detractors from black culture. Not surprisingly, an alternative critique of a colonial ideology that justified conquest and the material exploitation of colonies was rarely adopted. There are considerable dangers of essentialism here on both sides. Paul Gilroy has been especially eloquent on this point: The antagonistic relationship between these two outlooks has been especially intense in discussions of black art and cultural criticism. The ontological, essentialist view has often been characterised by a brute pan-Africanism. It has proved unable to specify precisely where the highly prized but doggedly evasive essence of black artistic and political sensibility is currently located . . . This perspective currently confronts a pluralistic position which affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of black particularity that is internally divided . . . There is no unitary idea of black community here.63

He suggests that one way around this opposition is through consideration of the musical output of blacks in the West. This has the advantage of moving beyond essentialism and textuality, because it also focuses on the model of performance as

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

31

addressed above. This paradigm offers a very different model from Walter Pater’s. Here music becomes a sight of struggle, reconciliation, agitation, self-expression. Toni Morrison has explained her relationship to writing in relation to music in related terms, My parallel is always the music because all of the strategies of the art are there . . . All the work that must go into improvisation so that it appears that you’ve never touched it . . . The power of the word is not music, but in terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror that gives me the necessary clarity . . . The major things black art has to have are these: it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things, and it must look effortless. It must look cool and easy.64

The relationship to the found object will be explored in more detail in the final chapter. But the model of music as a blend of poesies and politics allows, in Gilroy’s words, ‘the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation’.65 Importantly then, this model of music, this condition of music to which art might aspire, is not one that recognizes a disjuncture between art and life, inside and outside, mind and body, subject and object. This is a jazz-inflected, musical model of modernism.

L’art nègre Returning, by way of a conclusion, to the idea of primitivism as a concept central to the early phase of modernism, Martin Stein wrote in his book-length study, [le nègre is] ‘Africanized . . . and conceived as a radical and salutary antithesis to Europe, the nègre renders concrete a primitivity without compromise’.66 This is a figure who is not so much specifically African, as representative of the diaspora; a type of totemic or metonymic figure. Stein goes on in relation to themes we shall address later: ‘Elevated by Dada to the rank of absolute negator, the nègre renders real the tabula rasa of the instincts.’ The art dealer Paul Guillaume, who was quoted earlier and who, with Apollinaire, organized a very early exhibition of African art, Sculptures Nègres, in 1917, defined ‘L’art nègre’ in the memorable phrase: ‘the life-giving sperm of the spiritual twentieth century’.67 The politics of black culture are, nevertheless, ironically bleached, and here rendered by Guillaume as both as a white sheet (a fresh start) and a white liquid. Such figurative language and biological metaphor underlines the idea that there is something natural, unwritten, unguided, involuntary, simply instinctual, about black (male) culture; an explicit acknowledgement of the sexual power of the other. This occasions another bifurcation, between materiality (identified as black) and spirituality. Also operating here is a sense that this collective of binary tensions contains potential supplementary pairs, necessary but asymmetrical twinnings. It is also a context in which sound and sight are central. As spontaneous black sound and utterance is equated with the natural and the primitive, white European sound and utterance is equated with the cultured and the civilized, if sometimes ‘over’ civilized. In his Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses the notion of ‘phonocentrism’ in the context of the philosophy of language, in ways that discover further dimensions to these binaries.

32

Improvision

Phonocentrism: sound over sight In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida identifies what he calls the ‘logic of supplementarity’; this is to characterize the relationship between written text and spoken word. Derrida identifies a tendency in post-enlightenment thinking to associate the spoken word with access to unmediated pure truth, and writing as a ‘supplement’ to this, in the form of artificial re-presentation of this essential meaning. In the process, writing contaminates this verbal purity in formalized accretions and structures. However, writing is necessary as a ‘restoration, by a certain absence and by calculated effacement, of presence disappointed of itself in speech’. This is true not just of writing per se, but all forms of notation, including the musical (where sound can similarly be assigned priority) and the pictorial (where it is a question of the relationship between practice and representation); the supplement substitutes the representation (or sign) for the thing itself, implying a lack in the original.68 This is a characteristic way of thinking that is grounded in, among others, Hegel. Derrida quotes Hegel on sound: This ideal motion, in which through the sound . . . the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in a theoretical way, just as the eye shape and colour, thus allowing the interiority of the object to become interiority itself . . . The ear, on the contrary, perceives the result of that interior vibration of material substance without placing itself in a practical relation towards objects.69

In this way, he argues, sound is perceived as deeply subjective (made by and heard by the subject). The purity of speech is thus assumed to be immediate, natural and self-centred. In addition, Derrida looks in detail at this prioritization of sound over sight (or sound over sign) in Rousseau, and later Lévi-Strauss, both of whom see speech and the absence of writing (or in music the absence of notation) in what are described as ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ societies, as providing, through this absence, closer access to the ‘truth’. Sound appears to suffer less distortion than signs might experience. In both Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss, Derrida perceives an assumption of a community of selfpresence, at the level of a primal unity and purity, where, as he puts it, sound is identical with the ‘thought of the thing’.70 Further, in his discussion of Rousseau, Derrida explains the eighteenth-century writer’s ambition to hold song and voice in close alignment, while being aware that the intervals of the voice are not exactly those of melody; ‘Rousseau therefore hesitates . . . between two necessities: of marking the difference between the systems of vocal and musical intervals, but also of reserving all the resources of song in the original voice. The notion of imitation reconciles these two exigencies within ambiguity.’71 For Rousseau, the distance between speech and song is key: ‘In language which would be completely harmonious, as was the Greek at the beginning, the difference between the speaking and singing voices would be nil.’72 There is no music before language, as music is born of the voice, not of sound, according to Rousseau’s line of reasoning. Voice is summoned from desire (need) and by pity in imagination: ‘It seems then that need dictated the first gestures, while the passions wrung forth the first words.’73 Need was visible and passion sonoric. In this way, there is a parallel between the history of language and the history of music, and as Derrida

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

33

goes on, this involves the visual, ‘its evil is in essence graphic’.74 According to this Rousseaunian argument, nature, the point of origin, is where language and music were one, and this was a pre-graphic point in history, before notation and sign. Notation forms the wedge that separates music from language. The graphic is important here, because it moves both language (lexis) and music (melos) from pure, unmediated sound, across to sight (opsis). It brings into vision both music and word: From this it is evident that painting is closer to nature and that music is more dependent on human art. It is evident also that the one is more interesting than the other precisely because it does more to relate man to man and gives us some idea of our kind. Painting is often dead and inanimate [still life?]. It can carry you to the depth of the desert; but as soon as vocal signs strike your ear, they announce to you a being like yourself. They are so to speak the organs of the soul.

This is a subject, in other words, of abstraction and the function of mimesis, as well as an issue of identity. Music is, according to this line of reasoning, sound and abstract, art is material and representational. For Rousseau, nature is of course important, and something which we must exceed, but also rejoin. (‘We must return to it, but without annulling the difference.’) The death of pure song is a move from the horizontal to the vertical, from melody to harmony. Here sound moves from nature to culture. ‘Forgetfulness of the beginning is a calculation that puts harmony in the place of melody, the science of intervals in the place of the warmth of accent.’75 Music, according to Rousseau, has become too in thrall to harmony, and as a consequence has lost its innate power. Thus we see how singing gradually became an art entirely separate from speech, from which it takes its origin; how the harmonics of sounds resulted in the forgetting of the vocal inflections; and finally, how music, restricted to purely physical concurrences of vibrations, found itself deprived of the moral power it had yielded when it was the twofold voice of nature (italics after Derrida).

Music is joined by itself in harmony, and becomes further abstracted, and in the process departs from ‘song’. One of the advantages of jazz, for those who saw it as a revivifier of culture in the early twentieth century, was its proximity to song. Not only to song, but also to the body, with voice as the sound of the body. This returns music to a more ‘natural’ state (following Rousseau’s argument), it retreats from the abstract by being closer to the subject. With the growth of music, song and speech move further apart, split by the graphic. ‘To the degree that the language improved, melody, being governed by new rules, imperceptibly lost its former energy, and the calculus of intervals was substituted for nicety of inflection.’ The ‘science’ of intervals (harmony) replaces melody, and harmony results in the forgetting of vocal inflection and the split from nature is complete. Derrida sees this binary split as a fissure, but not ‘one among others. It is the fissure: the necessity of interval, the harsh law of spacing.’76 The interval, like writing, is therefore a form of supplement: it has a doubly ambiguous function as both an addition and a replacement, accretion and substitution.

34

Improvision

Derrida argues there is thus a binary function, to point to a lack and to complete, and this function produces ambiguity. It points to two gestures: ‘on the side of experience, a recourse to literature as appropriation of presence, that is to say, . . . of Nature; on the side of theory, an indictment against the negativity of the letter, in which must be read the degeneracy of culture and the disruption of the community’.77 The function of the supplement is important for what I shall go on to discuss, because of the weight put on the argument that jazz was both modern and primitive, and that improvisation precedes notation and is its antipode. It also relates specifically to the example that Derrida seeks in Rousseau – the role of gesture. Derrida shows that Rousseau regards gesture as a more ‘immediate sign’, more fundamental than speech (the indication of an object rather than a sign as a substitute). But in as much as gesture is the motive of writing, then the priority over speech is questioned; writing is both anterior and integral. In what follows, I want to deploy jazz as the fulcrum in a kind of double reading, but not a strictly deconstructive one, more playful. The engine of modernism is linked to the Rousseaunian mind-set of binary oppositions, and jazz, in particular, was deployed along a concomitant axis. It was positioned, contrarily, on either side of the equation and on both sides at the same time. The approach here is not to reduce the argument to one as more correct than the other, rather to promote complexity and to show how powerful jazz can be for understanding the necessary interrelationship between such binaries, and as a model for thinking with and through them. This way of thinking is especially important in relation to improvisation and is of especial significance to abstract (gestural) painting, because it is the body that understands and mediates, resolves and decides. This is what David Sudnow has called ‘the phenomenological description of articulated gestures of all sorts’. In relation to his learning jazz improvisation he writes: I learned this language through five years of overhearing it. Overhearing and seeing jazz – in a terrain nexus of hands and keyboard whose surfaces had become known as the surface of my tongue, teeth, and palate are known to each other – I came to see that this jazz music is, first and foremost, particular ways of moving from place to place. Without that motivated, skilled accomplishment, there’s no jazz for anyone to otherwise address.78

He summarizes,‘the body finds its way from place to place in the course of moving’ and this is as true of jazz improvisation as it is of artistic mark-making: ‘jazz music is, first a foremost, particular ways of moving’. Knowing here is not conscious, it is felt or tacit, but also learned and interiorized.79 Jazz improvisation and painting are both mindful and embodied. The French art historian Henri Focillon develops a related point to painting and sculpture and its tools. His points, I would contend, are as relevant to music as to painting (issues to which I shall return to in Chapter 5). His words are worth quoting at length: A very human familiarity exists between the tool [musical instrument, pen, brush, etc.] and the hand. Their harmony is composed of the subtlest sort of give- and-take that cannot be defined by habit alone. This give-and-take allows us to understand that, once the hand conforms to the tool, once the hand has need of this self-

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

35

extension in matter, the tool itself becomes what the hand makes it. The tool is more than a machine. Even if its very form already postulates what its activity is to be, even if its form indicates a definite future, that future is still not absolutely predestined . . . Should the hand rebel, it is through no desire to do away with the tool, but instead to establish a reciprocal possession on new foundations. That which acts is in turn acted upon. To understand these actions and reactions, let us abandon the isolated consideration of form, matter, tool and hand, and instead take up our position on the exact, geometric meeting place of their activity . . . The term that best describes the vigour of this ‘quadruple alliance’, and that gives to it an instantaneous impact, is borrowed from the language of painting – namely, the touch.80

This touch is the site of understanding, and is as significant for music as it is for art. We shall return to Derrida in relation to free jazz and broader questions of improvisation in Chapter 5, but first we return to the context of the reception of jazz in Europe, and to the paradoxes of jazz-generated binaries.

Part 2 The growth of interest in non-European music in the early years of the twentieth century was marked by an increase in publications about it and a concomitant, if ironic, belief that while they might represent a real alternative to the academic sterility of exhausted art forms (hence Guillaume’s ‘seminal’ phrase), their true value in themselves, as opposed to as an agent of change, was not to be trusted. In the same journals as these musics were lauded, they were often also dissected and judged negatively against conventional academic criteria.81 One way to counter this opposition, learning from the discussion of the supplement above, is to think through the idea of embodied knowledge, ‘the ways of the hand’, and to acknowledge that this tacit understanding operates between ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’. This also resists the simplistic assumption that black and white musicians inhabit different domains; those that ‘feel’ the music and those who do not. As early as 1902, the German musicologist (Dr) Gustav Kühl wrote about ‘The Musical Possibilities of Rag-Time’ in Die Musik, which was translated and republished in the American journal The Metronome the following year. Kühl works to clarify matters on this common binary opposition of genuine versus fake rag. The article seeks to differentiate genuine from ‘professionally composed’ rags, about which there is ‘no magic . . . it is merely a rhythm . . . based on the principle of syncopation . . .’ and here, although not made explicit, the difference between the ‘genuine’ and the ‘imitation’ is to be found in the indefinable ‘feel’, or intuitive grasp of the rhythm (the swing). Kühl declares, ‘Therefore, as already mentioned, there is no magic connected with it, although a European will never succeed to produce anything near a genuine ragtime’ [my emphasis]. This reverse racism is there to maintain difference. A similar biological difference holds back the European from feeling this rhythm deep in their body. He concludes with the following observation, having invoked the great Viennese composer:

36

Improvision the above quoted allusion to Schubert proves, that Ragtime is not to be condemned in every particular. Probably an unexpected prince will appear someday who like Liszt and Brahms, in the case of Hungarian music, will transplant this low class of Folk-music from the boards of the Variety stage to those of the Concert podium.82

Thus, the ultimate purpose of such new music is to feed Western concert music. As an aesthetic ambition it is worth considering this in a little more detail through the work of one of the most famous of ragtime composers. He, too, acknowledged a related ambition to become such a ‘Liszt’ as he turned from piano works to the composition of an opera, Treemonisha. Scott Joplin composed this work, which he completed in short score in 1911 and orchestrated 1914–15, only two years before his death. This summa to his career as a musician was to blend a number of different musical traditions together into one newly fashioned synthesis. It is worth remembering that the idea of a ragtime opera in 1915 would have been seen by many as oxymoronic. However, the opera qua opera is not the issue here, what is most interesting is how Joplin aspired to bring about this synthesis of different musical impulses. The main theme of the opera is a vision of AfricanAmerican liberation and the active role that culture might play as a means to that liberation. Joplin, as Klaus-Dieter Gross has argued, more than many other black cultural figures, such as his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois for example, believed in the possibility of liberty produced through a blending of African (-American) and European cultural (musical) traditions.83 ‘Joplin fused ragtime with what he knew of European art music and yet simultaneously probed “deeply into the pre-rag folk roots of black American music,” into religious call-and-response songs, creating arias vaguely patterned after the emerging blues form, and composing versions of the ring shout.’84 This impulse to hybridity is not exceptional to ragtime. Joplin’s opera is like, for example, Duke Ellington’s85 and Charles Mingus’s86 later ballets, in being only pronounced examples of an explicit convergence. Such hybrids are sometimes referred to, to use Gunter Schuller’s term, as ‘third stream’ music. But this is to suppose clear criteria of definition from which deviations can be judged. Conversely, we can consider the tension, clash, interaction and dynamic current between musical cultures as definitive of jazz itself (and its nascent forms), and it is this that makes it a particularly rich paradigm for key strains of modernism. While one view of modernism holds to its attempts to abstract general laws, to construct meta-narratives in line with the Enlightenment project of universalism, linked to the absolute condition of music; the concurrent, but contrary condition of music proposed by jazz, moves towards the found object and individual expression, proposing a modernism of synthesis. As we considered in relation to Derrida above, the place of the score, or notation, is often related in such narratives as key to fixing meaning, so it is worth saying a few words about the role of sheet music in the transmission of ragtime.

Sheet music and performance The place of written music in ragtime is complex. One of the main reasons for this is the commercial dimension. Sheets of ragtime music were often simplified (in technical

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

37

terms), in order to be consumed by a wide and diverse amateur public. What we see is not what would have usually been heard in performance.87 Joplin was well aware of the economic imperatives of a rapidly developing industry in popular music publishing, and while he retained the spirit of the improvised ragtime tradition in his compositions, and incorporated his leisurely piano style, he was also constrained by the conditions of Western musical notation, and by his conception of musical form.88 His later style became more classical in its adherence to the specifics of written notation, as Waterman among others has shown.89 The technical complexity of ragtime often involved long passages of improvised material within the given harmonic framework. This was summed up, in a group context, a few years later by Sidney Bechet: That’s the thing about ragtime . . . It ain’t a writing down where you just play what it says on the paper in front of you, and so long as you do that the arranger, he’s taken care of everything else. When you’re really playing ragtime, you’re feeling it out, you’re playing to the other parts, you’re waiting to understand what the other man’s doing, and then you’re going with his feeling, adding what you have of your feeling. You’re not trying to steal anything and you’re not trying to fight anything.90

In 1915 Edward Winn published an instruction manual, How to Play Ragtime (Uneven Rhythm), which highlights this issue. In parallel to this manual he also designed an extensive monthly and very successful instruction course called ‘Ragtime Piano Playing’, which was serialized for more than four years in the magazines Cadenza (March 1915–October 1916) and Tuneful Yankee/Melody (January 1917–June 1918). In the introduction to the course he explained the aim and the central difficulty around this tension between text and improvisation: Aside from the technic required, ragtime presents two unusual problems to the pianist, namely, the ability to harmonize offhand or enlarge upon and make adaptions to the harmony given, and then to syncopate (rag) the tones thus provided. To play a composition as arranged and written for piano is one thing; to convert a melody and accompaniment into effective ragtime is quite another.91

In addition to this explicit pedagogic material he also, rather tautologically, wrote out examples of ‘improvisations’ based on ragged versions of familiar traditional material (such as ‘My Old Kentucky Home’), or classical material (for example ‘Spring Song’ by Mendelssohn) and more recent popular melodies. He also had a monthly column in the magazine Melody where he discussed and provided examples of ragged contemporary songs.92 Professional improvisation often manifest itself through the famous contests of keyboard skill by such performers as Tom Turpin (1871–1922) the composer of ‘Harlem Rag’ (1897) and the owner of a saloon in St Louis, Missouri, which became a meeting place for itinerant pianists. The divergence between recordings of the music, through notation or piano rolls, and actual performance is even more marked with

38

Improvision

these performers. They included Joe Jordan (1882–1971) and John William ‘Blind’ Boone (1864–1927), whose prodigious technique made it very difficult for the early piano rolls he recorded accurately to register all his notes. Many early rolls were heavily edited, modified and embellished, with additions that ‘orchestrated’ them: ‘Some rolls are so heavily . . . rearranged that they are called “orchestral” arrangements – every note on the keyboard seems to play during performance.’93 His best known composition, for example, ‘The Marshfield Tornado’ (named after the natural disaster of 1880) was never recorded or written down, reportedly due to its complexity and variability.94 One account of its performance states that he ‘Play[ed] with wrists and elbows as well as with his fingers, and that audience went wild.’95 These issues are expanded in an account by his manager of a ‘play off ’ between Boone and another pianist from California. The Californian played his own composition first. When he had finished at last, Boone applauded warmly, then walked unassisted over to a second piano which no one had told him about but which he has located from hearing the over-tones. Without even sitting down, he said, “That was very good. This is the part that I liked best,” and he whipped through the middle section without a flaw. That room went wild. The Californian shook my hand and said in a broken voice, “My God, I’d go to Hell and back for that man!” The next day Boone played the “Marshfield Tornado” for the rolls, but he went so fast and played so hard that he stripped the gears in the machine; so we came back to Missouri without a record of it, and now it’s lost to the world.96

The ‘ways of the hand’ supersede notation and record. Boone often mixed classical compositions and rags, and in this demonstrated another element of the essential hybridity of early rag culture. Another performer at Turpin’s saloon was Louis Chauvin (1881–1908) who some regarded as the finest pianist among this company, although he died at the young age of twenty-seven. Although he made a considerable impression on those who experienced his performance, he left only three published compositions. Most significant of these was the ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’, the second half of which was left incomplete due to Chauvin’s ill health, and was finished and edited by his friend, Scott Joplin. He was never recorded.97 As ragtime gave way to what would become known as jazz, so the importance of written music, sheet music, gave way to recordings of musical performance, of which piano rolls are a part. This is a hugely significant ontological shift and one that moves from the centrality of lexis and the optical, to the importance of ‘process’. Ironically, with the advent of recording, the improvised element of ragtime, invisible in its sheetmusic form, became ‘visible’, although fixed by the process. As Evan Eisenberg has argued, ‘records not only disseminated jazz, but inseminated it – that is, in some ways they created what we call jazz’. Eisenberg explains how jazz performance and the technology to preserve and reproduce it in records created the category ‘jazz’ itself.98 Jazz emerged from the development of the commercial market and the shifts of understandings and meanings generated by this technology. Performance and recording are not therefore antithetical, but twinned.

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

39

The emergence of nascent jazz in Europe It is generally presumed that jazz only appeared on the European stage with the arrival of American troops in France, and while this is in large part true in terms of a substantial impact, as we have seen the stage was already set by the cakewalk and ragtime, and what we call by the name jazz had also in fact crossed the Atlantic just before hostilities broke out. The birth of jazz should not be expected to be clear cut. In the summer of 1914, the Southern Symphonists Quintet opened in the Piccadilly Restaurant, in London, led by the drummer Louis Mitchell, featuring a floor show by the dancers Louise Alexander and Jack Jarrett, and solo drum sets by Mitchell himself. He had been advised by Irving Berlin that he might get a good reception in Europe, having had a previous career in minstrel and vaudeville shows.99 Given the subsequent reception of jazz, it is perhaps significant that the first jazz group experienced in Europe should have been led by a drummer. The residency of Mitchell and his quintet was reported by both English and French journalists, who respectively described Mitchell as ‘the supreme artist of noise’ and ‘la plus grande batterie du monde’.100 The greatest impact of the music came, like ragtime, through its innovations in rhythm (syncopation) which were powered by the drum kit, a novelty instrument at the time, in as much as its now familiar form was still evolving (Ludwig & Ludwig had only patented the bass drum pedal in 1909).101 Drummers in jazz ensembles may be seen as equivalent to the conductor in classical music scenarios, but whereas the conductor signifies pulse and synchronization silently and purely visually, an irony for the idea of absolute music,102 in jazz (and other AfricanAmerican-derived musical forms) the pulse is usually controlled by the sound of the drummer, which, in a sensitive ensemble, can be extremely subtle. The novelty of this to early twentieth-century audiences accounts in part for the descriptions of jazz as an ‘art of noise’. It is also a consequence of the increasing rhetoric around the concept of noise that followed industrialization and urbanization.103 Jazz was a metonym for the emerging age (to invoke F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase) as well as key to defining its art. Mitchell was known as the ‘whirlwind ragtime drummer’. Again, the tropes invoke a force of nature, and ‘ragtime’ reminds us that at this time the word jazz was still little used. His impact was only in part from the sound he made, the other important element was the visual novelty of the drum-kit in performance. A photo from a little later, c. 1920, of the Jazz Kings in the Casino de Paris, shows the trumpet player Cricket Smith swinging to play in Mitchell’s direction, passing the musical gesture across, while Mitchell sits at a small kit of bass drum, two toms and a couple of cymbals, with Joe Meyers, piano, leaning back and gesturing in the opposite direction. This dynamic group, all swaying to the left, are in contrast to the more symmetrical and uniformly presented group of Walter Kildaire banjo, Frank Withers trombone, Dan Parrish bass and James Shaw sax.104 Such recordings that do exist, and Pathé made a number of them in 1922 (starting with ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’), present a slightly more controlled account which, like ragtime sheet music, is a consequence of the etiquette of presentation and recording over the freedom of live performance. With the outbreak of war Mitchell returned to the US but was back in London in late 1915 and then to Glasgow in 1916. Having secured a commission from the Casino de Paris to organize a 45-piece big band, he returned to New York to hire musicians, but

40

Improvision

due to US State Department restrictions on travel to France this was cancelled and instead he formed the septet mentioned above and seen in the photo, called Mitchell’s Jazz Kings. With this group he finally travelled to France in 1918 to give free concerts to Allied troops. They were eventually engaged at the Casino de Paris, a music hall in the rue de Clichy, south of Montmartre, where they were resident for five years. By this time (c. 1924) Mitchell had been followed by other black musicians (and jazz had become a more established presence in the French capital) among whom was a group formed by the remarkable musician mentioned above, Will Marion Cook.105

Cook and Europe Cook was a classically trained violinist who studied first at Oberlin Conservatory, before, through a combination of African-American philanthropy and benefit concerts, enough money was raised to allow him to study for two years at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, between 1887 and 1889. It is sometimes reported that he studied with Joachim. However, there is no evidence for this in the Hochschule’s records, although according to his biographer Marva Carter, he may have taken private lessons. The records do show that he studied with one of Joachim’s students, Heinrich Jacobsen. On his return to America he began to conduct and soon had taken up the post of director for a new African-American orchestra in Washington. At their first concert on 26 September 1890, at Grand Army Hall, they featured a saxophone for the first time in an African-American orchestra. Cook went on to the new National Conservatory of Music in New York to study composition with the Director, Antonin Dvořák. The Conservatory was much more racially diverse than any other music school at the time. Cook recalled: I went to New York to study at the National Conservatory of Music – endowed by Mrs Jeannette M. Thurber . . . She made no distinction of color, creed or state of good looks. She didn’t even care much about the money. Jews, Negros, real white people. Fact was a little bit of everything and everybody was in the musical melting pot. All she and Dr Dvořák asked was talent – heaps of it – and the power of concentration on the subject at hand.106

Dvořák’s conviction for a national music founded in folk music, ‘Negro melodies’, extended to his support for the African-American musicians who played them. He had written to the New York Herald in May 1893 in support of the foundation of a new ‘musical school for America’, stating, ‘It is my opinion that I find a sure foundation in the Negro melodies for a new national school of music.’107 Cook’s interests turned increasingly towards composition and conducting and away from performance.108 This move to composition was also driven by an interest in a new musical genre and the opportunities it offered his creativity: musical theatre. While in New York, Cook wrote a series of musicals as composer-in-residence for the George Walker–Bert Williams Company. Like his mentor Dvořák, he too used ‘folk’ material, in a distinctive and original manner. During the early years of the twentieth century Cook got to know James Reese Europe, the founder of the Clef Club, an organization for African Americans in the

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

41

music industry.109 Jed Rasula tellingly called Europe ‘the single most influential agent in the dissemination of jazz before it was jazz’.110 Europe also had a connection to Dvořák. He was taught by another of Dvořák’s pupils, the composer and singer Harry Burleigh.111 In 1912, Europe directed the Clef Club Orchestra, the first black ensemble to perform at Carnegie Hall, in a programme written exclusively by black composers. One of the principle sponsors of this event, the ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis (to be discussed in the next chapter), wrote the following about this concert: It was an astonishing sight, that Negro orchestra . . . that filled the entire stage with banjos, mandolins, guitars, a few violins, violas, cellos, double basses, here and there a wind instrument, some drums, eloquent in syncopation, and the sonorous background of ten upright pianos. . . . Europe uplifted his baton and the orchestra began (with an accuracy of ‘attack’ that many a greater band might envy) a stirring march composed by the leader. It was the ‘Pied Piper’ again, for as one looked through the audience, one saw heads swaying and feet tapping in time to the incisive rhythm, and when the march neared the end, and the whole band burst out singing as well as playing, the novelty of this climax – a novelty to the whites, at least – brought a very storm of tumultuous applause.112

The dissemination of this music in France was a consequence of the group Europe led during his military service, the 369th US Infantry ‘Hell Fighters’ Band. They played a number of concerts throughout France to great acclaim, programmes of mixed music, including rags. It is somewhat ironic that the figure who probably did most to sow the seeds of jazz in Europe shared its name. After returning safely from war to be welcomed back by a huge crowd as he and the band disembarked, he was soon signed up by a record label and quickly dubbed the ‘Jazz King’. Tragically however, shortly after this, in 1919, he was murdered by one of his own musicians.113 The full irony of both his surname and the title jazz king is manifested later, when Paul Whiteman adopted the appellation the ‘King of Jazz’ (a film of that title starring Whiteman was made in 1930). During this time Cook was the Clef Club Orchestra’s assistant conductor, chorus master, violinist and composer of songs. Through Europe he also met many of the musicians that were to form his next musical group in the year of Europe’s death, 1919. First called the New York Syncopated Orchestra, it was later known as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (the Syncopates) and emerged out of a Clef Club ensemble. In June1919 they travelled to England with a jazz saxophonist who was to become one of the most important soloists in early jazz, Sidney Bechet (1897–1959).

Ansermet on jazz Two of the most attentive ears to come across the Syncopates belonged to the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. Amongst other things, Ansermet had conducted the premières of Satie’s Parade; a number of works by Stravinsky including The Soldier’s Tale, Les noces, Renard, and Pulcinella; de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, Prokofiev’s Chout; and later Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. As a musician at the forefront of modernist developments in European ‘classical’ music, he was alive to the originality, audacity and

42

Improvision

physicality of this new music. He saw in jazz much to be admired and in 1919, soon after Cook brought his ensemble to Europe (landing first in Liverpool), Ansermet wrote what must count as the first detailed consideration of jazz in Europe: ‘On a Negro Orchestra’.114 This early text is worthy of pause as it recognizes important characteristics and goes some way towards appreciating jazz on its own terms. Although it occasionally condescends, it demonstrates a laudable aspiration to think critically in relation to European norms (already destabilized by the avant-garde) and above all to listen closely, recognizing originality and difference. Ansermet understands the flexibility of group performance, he emphasizes performance over text, is aware of the importance of the nascent tradition and demonstrates an unusual and profound respect for fellow musicians in the jazz context. He also recognizes his own major failing. The racial divide of the time makes it very difficult for him fully to understand the performers’ sensibility, to judge their interior motivation. However, this distance was almost bridged by his close listening and unbounded enthusiasm for what he heard. The essay opens with a discussion of ragtime as synonymous with jazz and as a music, not of Africa, but of the Southern United States; a music based on syncopation, ‘we dance to rag-time under the name of jazz in all our cities’.115 He goes on, arguing that what he calls ‘learned music’,116 in the guise of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel, has learnt directly from jazz, but important lessons can be learnt from attending to the source of their inspiration. This source is identified with the ‘authentic’ music of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which Ansermet first heard in London.117 ‘The first thing that strikes one about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra is the astonishing perfection, the superb taste, and the fervor of its playing.’118 He goes on by observing that their musicianship is not necessarily (he cannot be sure) based on the same ‘code of musical morals’ as European musicians, or indeed a conscious ‘idea’, but is more instinctive, ‘an irresistible force’, that is keenly communicated to the audience by their love of what they do. The primitivist assumption that their musicianship must be a product of intuition rather than study is perhaps not surprising, but was probably amplified in Ansermet’s mind by their lack of attention to a score: ‘They play generally without notes, and even when they have some, it only serves to indicate a general line, for there are very few numbers I have heard them execute twice with exactly the same effect.’ This improvisation is not linked by him to composition, but to ‘letting themselves go . . . as their heart desires’, they are ‘possessed by the music’. Jazz is imagined, therefore, as a consequence of something natural, rather than being the product of art and calculation. The musicians are possessed, the music flows through them (and of course, if improvisation is done well, this is the impression it should give), but it is interesting that Ansermet never assumed the reverse case, that it is the musicians who possess the music. He then describes the range of material that makes up the music, where it is composed (albeit by composers ‘unknown by our world’), or ‘traditional’ (mainly religious) or based on music of European origin (Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Debussy), ‘thus nearly all, the music . . . is, in origin, foreign’ to the African-American. But the ‘alien’ nature is not the issue, it is the spirit of its performance that he sees as primary (this ties in with the tradition of ‘ragging’ pieces – syncopated variations of existing pieces). In other words, and this is something missed by many other observers and listeners, jazz is a ‘how’ not a ‘what’. Authorial responsibility lies in the performer and the event, rather

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

43

than in the ‘composer’ and the score. As Jelly Roll Morton put it at the head of this chapter, ‘Ragtime is a certain type of syncopation and only certain tunes can be played in that idea, but jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune.’ In his description of the sincerity of execution and the emotional commitment of the performers, he shows an émigré’s empathy (he was Swiss, but lived in France), for what he appreciates is the far greater horror and anguish of having been carried off in slavery and deposited on a different continent. ‘One shudders in conjuring up such an image.’ But he imagines the ‘first music they find is the songs which the missionaries teach them, and immediately, they make it over to suit themselves’. In doing this recomposition they are led, he proposes, by ‘expression’ and rhythm, rather than meaning and rule (harmony). Again, the function of rhythm in relation to the body is emphasized; ‘Negro songs are strewn with syncopes which issue from the voice while the movement of the body marks the regular rhythm . . . Negro music consists in the habit of syncopating any musical material whatsoever.’ Here again, Ansermet proves himself a subtle listener, arguing this is not mere effect, it comes from an expressive need, it is ‘the genius of the race’. Fundamentally this is a felt rhythm, a phenomenological relationship between the body and music. This ‘genius’, he goes on, impacts not only rhythm, but also timbre. For example, in playing the trombone, the embouchure, vibrato, and fluid use of the slide, in the hands of such an expert performer, transform it into a new instrument. This is no less true of the ‘Negro way of playing’ any instrument, or of using the voice, or most emphatically, of all percussion which the performer ‘grasps all the paraphernalia instantaneously including the most excessive refinements, to set up an inexhaustible jugglery’. It is the timbre of the whole ensemble that most effects Ansermet, both familiar instruments defamiliarized and unfamiliar instruments (he is reluctant to believe the banjo is an invention of African-Americans), the whole ‘displays a terrific dynamic range, going from a subtle sonority reminiscent of Ravel’s orchestra to a terrifying tumult in which shouts and hand-clapping are mixed’. Again, compared to the still controlled deportment of the European orchestra, the jazz orchestra is all movement and texture. The boundaries between body and music are constantly crossed, shouting and handclapping are but the ebullience of the musical body over-spilling. Ansermet then turns to melody and harmony. He notes how equal temperament is not sustained in jazz intonation, with thirds somewhere between major and minor, false seconds and an inclination towards natural harmonics (what we would now call blues notes – flattened 3rds, 5ths and 7ths). In relation to harmony, he perceives fewer innovations, except in the use of seventh chords and what he calls ‘ambiguous majorminor’ chords which we might call quintal harmony, that is, harmony preferring the perfect fifth, the augmented fifth and the diminished fifth (with the omission of the third and hence major/minor ambiguity), a foundation on which flexible improvisation can be built. He sums up this approach with a perceptive ontological point: ‘The work may be written, but it is not fixed, and it finds complete expression only in actual performance.’ This music is, he says, ‘still in its period of oral tradition’, and the significance of an author is ‘counterbalanced by the action of tradition, represented by the performer’. It is this emphasis on expression that leads him to consider the blues.

44

Improvision

Ansermet sees the blues as a form of catharsis; the performer takes ‘a motif . . . plumbs the depths of his imagination. This make the sadness pass away – it is the blues.’ Its greatest poet is to be found in the ranks of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. ‘I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it – it is Sidney Bechet.’ He regards Bechet as a figure equal to those musicians of the European classical tradition who, lost in the mists of time, laid the foundations for Haydn and Mozart. Bechet, ‘who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his “own way”, is perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow’.119 Bechet is again characterized as a musician of instinct, but for Ansermet this is the foundation on which a new art is built. So, what are we to make of Ansermet’s remarkable essay? It is clear that he has paid close attention to the music and in doing so has appreciated it largely on its own terms. There are, of course, a number of conventional tropes still left in place. Black musicians are seen by him as effectively re-inventing music through innovations in rhythm, principally through syncopation which he sees as derived from an expressive need that transforms all it touches, be it traditional songs, religious music or anything else. This ‘instinct’ cannot be learnt (Ansermet regards European imitators as lacking it), it amounts to the embodiment of the music, the ‘feel’ of it. This embodied understanding comes through not just in rhythm, but also through instrumentation and techniques of performance, in the way instruments imitate the ‘nègre voice’. We might now call it a form of tacit knowledge. The feel of the rhythm, and the gestures of improvisation are understood in the body, in the moment. Musical instruments are a kind of prosthetic in this context. This proximity to the body also helps the music to be understood in terms of ‘instinct’ and natural dynamics rather than as acquired and practised, but it is through practice and understanding that such ‘instinct’ is, of course, developed and such tacit knowledge established. Ironically it was the very professionalism of the performers, the apparent ease with which they played, that allowed this idea to take hold. Had they been less proficient, their abilities, though more limited, would have seemed more acquired and they might have appeared as agents of the music rather than its conduits. Ansermet’s conception of the melodic qualities of the voice, combined with a harmony that at some deep level remembers African modalities, again perceives this effort as rooted in the body of the performer. What makes this music is the ‘spirit’. This is infectious and exciting and offers the best model for the future path. In short, Ansermet sees jazz as key to modernity: tomorrow’s highway.

Notes 1 2

S. Shaw-Miller, ‘Music, A Complex Art’, in The Art of Music, ed. P. Coleman (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 30. D. Wilton, ‘The baseball origins of jazz’. Oxford Dictionaries.com. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 15 Oct. 2017. ‘The first known appearance of the word jazz is in 1912 in reference to baseball’s Pacific Coast League. Ben Henderson, a pitcher for the Portland Beavers, invented a new pitch he called the jazz ball. ‘I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it,’ Henderson is quoted as

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13

45

saying in a 2 April 1912 Los Angeles Times article.’ Hopkins’ article, ‘In Praise of ‘Jazz’, a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language’, San Francisco Bulletin, 5 April 1913, is reprinted in L. Porter, Jazz, A Century of Change (New York: Schirmer, 1999), pp. 6–8. Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 July 1915. Ibid, p. 8. See J. Szwed, Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 7. Ozella OZ070CD/GEMA, published by Editions Ozella, 2017. Author’s correspondence with Helge Lien (October 2017). In addition to the movement evident between lexis and melos, it is interesting to note that the music label on which the Helge Lien album was released, Ozella (a German label based at Schloss Hamborn near Paderborn), released a limited, special edition pairing of a vinyl, gate-fold LP by selected performers (including Lien) together with a unique poplar wood sculpture (the same size as the LP (12″), made by the artist Werner Schlegel, which is different for each release (limited to 12). Under the title ‘Wood ’n’ Vinyl’ they describe them: ‘Each one of the image-sculptures is a unique item, but all of them share the same character. Both items . . . will be shipped in an elegant box’. The idea of this special edition – to combine visual arts and music – was in a state of continuous progress and lively exchange between Werner Schlegel and Dagobert Böhm (Ozella Music) for many years (www.ozellamusic.com/en/artist/ wood-n-vinyl/). See Lewis Porter, Jazz; A Century of Change (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997). Not all will be happy to think of these musicians as jazz performers, but all have been called that at some point. As performers who play in the nexus and space that provides a mutual respect for different improvising musical traditions, I ca not think of a better term to describe their music. I would also raise questions in relation to the concept of ‘fusion’. While it is a term that applies to a particular period (1970s), as Pat Metheny argued more specifically (and he is an artist who often endured the label), ‘Hardly any musicians use the term [Fusion] – it’s mainly press and record companies which do. I don’t think I’ve ever run across a musician who would say “Well what kind of music do I play? – I play fusion”. I mean nobody says that.’ (Quoted after Brodowski and Szprot, ‘Pat Metheny’, Jazz Forum, vol. 97, no. 6 (June 1985), pp. 34–5, 38–9, 42–3. This is perhaps most succinctly put by the composer Mike Gibbs: ‘I think to label a particular music “fusion music” is to limit the music. There’s a lot of jazz-rock fusion at the moment [1978], and as long as music is labelled that way, it always remains two musics and the fusions don’t have room to take place. There is fusion going on every time somebody writes music, all the things that have influenced that writing.’ Quoted in J. Coryell and L. Friedman, Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, the Music (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2000), p. 84. For example, what is called neoclassicism or more individually neo-mainstream. The development of free jazz, fusion and what flowed from them (the so-called avantgarde) is what exceeds the ‘traditional’ definition of jazz. See also Wynton Marsalis, ‘What Jazz is – and Isn’t’, New York Times (31 July 1988, Arts and Leisure), and Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? Or Has It Moved Address (New York: Routledge, 2005). See for example Scott De Veaux, ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography’ in Black American Literature Forum, 1 October 1991, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 525–60, and J. Gennari, ‘Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies’, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1991), p. 449.

46

Improvision

14 Quoted after P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 341. 15 For more on this see L. Cerchiari, L. Cugny and F. Kerschbaumer (eds), EuroJazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics and Contexts (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2012) especially chapter 16 by T. Whyton, ‘Europe and the New Jazz Studies’, pp. 366–80. 16 S. Žižek, On Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 67–8. 17 This is discussed in R. G. O’Meally (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), see also chapter 1 ‘Jazz – The Word’ for more on the debates over etymology. 18 P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, p. 68. See also chapter 2. 19 For example, the Yoruba language, from southwestern and north-central Nigeria and central Benin, spoken by c. 30 million, see Metzler Lexikon Sprache (4th edn 2010). 20 Ibid. 21 Sidney Bechet, who will be discussed later, is another significant Creole musician who problematizes the black–white divide. See C. Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001), p. 13. 22 See C. H. Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (California University Press, 2008), p. 13; also chapter 2. See also Christopher Washburne’s ‘Armstrong and Ellington Do the “Rhumba”: The Case for Jazz as a Transnational and Global Music’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Houston, November 2003. 23 T. Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 2011), p. 381. 24 See N. A. Wynn, Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 25 Black American ragtime was recorded as early as January 1908 in Berlin (see ‘Black Music in Europe: A Hidden History’, BBC radio 4, episode 1, first broadcast Tuesday 19 December 2017. Much of the music in this series was drawn from Black Europe, a vast boxed set issued by Bear Family Records and documenting the sounds of the era (based on the archive of Rainer Lotz in Bonn, consisting of over 56 hours of music on 44 discs). 26 See P. Blanchard, Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012). 27 Gérard Noiriel, Chocolat, clown nègre: L’histoire oubliée du premier artiste noir de la scène française (Montrouge, Editions Bayard, 2012) and by the same author, Chocolat – La véritable histoire d’un clown sans nom (Montrouge, Editions Bayard, 2016). 28 For a clip of parts of their a performance around 1900 see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qpYTanqDzvc. 29 A copy of which is held in the Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA. 30 Its title signified its difference from its rival, Mercure de France, which had a purple cover, rather than having any explicit racist connotations. Among others it was variously associated not only with Lautrec, but also Marcel Proust, Léon Blum, Félix Fénéon and Emile Durkheim. 31 For more on the context of black performers at this time, see J. Smalls, ‘ “Race” As Spectacle in Late-Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture’ in French Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 351–82. 32 J. Smalls, ‘Visualizing racial antics in late nineteenth-century France’ in Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. A. L. Childs and S. H. Libby (Ashgate, 2014) pp. 145–74, quotation p. 165.

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

47

33 Ibid, p. 165. 34 As this same critic explained, ‘The cakewalk is a dance, baptized as such because the couple who brings the most fantasy and grace to their execution of it receives a cake as a prize.’ See Addé, Le Gaulois (28 October 1902), p. 3. Quoted after M. F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Illinois University Press, 2010), pp. 20–21. 35 Quoted after J. Blake, Le Tumult noir (Penn State University Press, 1999), p. 21. 36 See for example, J. Portes, Fascinations and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 37 See for example, M. F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity and W. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: a Paris story between the great wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 38 See P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso 1993) esp. chapter 1, ‘The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity’, pp. 1–40. 39 Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity, p. 105. 40 See for example, J. T. Scott, ‘Rousseau and the Melodious Language of Freedom’ in Journal of Politics, vol. 59, no. 3 (August 1997), pp. 803–29. 41 For example as the Norwegian jazz pianist Eivind Austad explained in the press release for his 2018 album Northbound (LOS211–2): ‘I may have an idea, a starting point, but when I bring it forward to Magne and Håkon [bass and drums respectively] and we start working, we very often end up with something quite different and better. To me, sounding perfect is less important than sounding vital, and I’d rather be challenged and surprised than play in a trio with no resistance, no interference, no dissonance in the interplay.’ 42 C. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859), sec. IV ‘Modernity’ in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art & Artists, ed. P. E. Charvet, Penguin Classics, 1981 (and reprints), pp. 420–22. 43 See Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music (chapter 1) (Yale, 2002). 44 See R. Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 45 C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 60. 46 Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music, p. 15. 47 H. Foster, Prosthetic Gods (MIT Press, October Books, 2004), p. xi. 48 Ibid, p. 342. 49 J. F. Lane, ‘Rythme de Travail, Rythme de Jazz: Jazz, primitivism, and machinisme in inter-war France’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 4, 2007, Issue 1: The French Atlantic, pp. 103–16. 50 P. Guillaume, ‘The Discovery and Appreciation of Primitive Negro Sculpture’, Les Arts à Paris 12 (May, 1926), p. 13. See J. Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 51 See Blake, Le Tumulte noir, p. 12. 52 Sousa’s most well know piece associated with the two-step was the ‘Washington Post March’ of 1891. The great ragtime composer Scott Joplin also composed marches and two steps, for example his ‘Cleopha’ (2/4) and ‘March Majestic’ (6/8) both of 1902. 53 See T. Kinney, Social Dancing of To-day (New York, 1914), available through the Library of Congress Web site https://www.loc.gov/resource/musdi.202.0/?sp=1. 54 See B. Baldwin, ‘The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality’, Journal of Social History 15 (Winter 1981), pp. 21–46. Also I. A. Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963), p. 86: ‘If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? I

48

55 56

57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Improvision find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony – which, I suppose, is the whole point of minstrel shows.’ See Blake, Le Tumulte noir, p. 21. Harry Fragson was born Léon Philippe Pot in London in 1869, he later moved to Paris where one of his songs features in sheet music in Picasso’s collages. He was shot by his mentally ill father in 1913 and is buried in Pére-Lachaise cemetery. See Manchester Evening News, 28 January 1914, ‘The Shooting of Harry Fragson’, p. 2. See footnote 108. Sometimes William Mercer Cook (1869–1944). Jeannette R. Murphy, ‘The True Negro Music and its Decline’, Independent (23 July 1903). This was even the case with the appalling ‘exhibition’ of African people in the zoos and ethnographic exhibitions, for example the Jardin d’Acclimatation where in 1903 members of the Ashantis people played music and danced. Such displays were regarded as authentic presentation of genuine culture. See B. Kirshenblatt-Gimbelett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’ in I. Karp and S. D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, 1991), pp. 386–443. A. Dvořák, ‘Real Value of Negro Melodies’, New York Herald (21 May 1893), quoted after L. Levine, ‘Jazz and American Culture’, Journal of American Folklore (vol. 102, no. 403, Jan.–Mar. 1989), pp. 6–22 at p. 9. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 31–2. P. Gilroy, ‘Living Memory: An Interview with Toni Morrison’ in Small Acts: thoughts on the politics of black cultures (London, 1993), p. 181. My emphasis. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 40. See M. Stein, Blaise Cendrars: bilans nègres (Paris, Archives des Lettres Modernes, 1977), p. 62. See also C. R. Batson, Dance, Desire and Anxiety in Early TwentiethCentury French Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 153. See A. Césaire, Discourse in Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York University Press: 1972, 2000), p. 93. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 9. Ibid, p. 12. See ibid, p. xvi. Ibid, p. 196. Ibid, p. 198. Ibid, 195. Ibid, p. 199. Ibid. Ibid, p. 200. Ibid, p. 144. See D. Sudnow’s wonderful account of how his hands learned to improvise jazz on the piano, Ways of the Hand: A Rewitten Account, 2nd ed. (MIT Press, 2001), p. 127. Ibid, p. 127. H. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. C. B. Hogan and G. Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 109. La Revue musicale instituted a column in 1905 called ‘Musique populaire et exotique’ and a new 1905 journal Le Mercure musical regularly published articles on non-

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

90 91 92

93

49

European music. In October 1902 The Musician published an article by W. F Gates called ‘Ethiopian Syncopations – The Decline of Ragtime’: ‘. . . this craze for “rag-time” seems to be on the wane. It is certainly to be hoped so. For it creates in the minds of the young a distaste for that which is more staid and solid, more dignified and useful. It is an appetite for spices rather than for nutritious food.’ A sentiment that is to ring down the century as ever new musics emerge to lead the young off the right path. See K. Koening, Jazz in Print (1856–1929): An Anthology of Selected Early Readings (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2002), pp. 75–6. See K-D. Gross, ‘The Politics of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha’ in Amerikastudien/ American Studies, vol. 45, no. 3 (2000), pp. 387–404. Ibid, p. 395. Quotation is from T. Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 25. Three Black Kings (1943) and The River (1970). The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963). It should also be noted that there was some use of ‘reproducing piano rolls’, although the most subtle ones (able to reproduce touch and dynamics) were not effectively developed until the second decade of the twentieth century (Due-Art, Welte-Mignon and Ampico, for example). The two standard rag forms tended to be ABACD and ABCD. See G. Waterman, ‘Ragtime’ in The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz, ed. M. T. Williams (London: Cassell, 1960), pp. 11–31. In addition, Waterman insists that ragtime was a composed not an improvised music. The material evidence left behind in the form of sheet music supports this case, but accounts of performance do not. For example, James Weldon Johnson’s account: ‘The barbaric harmonies, the audacious resolutions, often consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, the intricate rhythms in which the accent fell in the most unexpected places, but in which the beat was never lost, produced a most curious effect. And, too, the player – the dexterity of his left hand in making rapid octave runs and jumps was little short of marvellous; and with his right hand he frequently swept half the keyboard with clean-cut chromatics.’ Quoted after E. A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (University of California Press), p. 76. As Berlin argues (p. 77) while ‘much of the music-buying public probably did play the music as written . . ., it is unlikely that professional ragtime musicians, accustomed by training and inclination to ragging all kinds of musical material, would slavishly adhere to a printed score’. S. Bechet, Treat it Gentle (London: Cassell, 1960), p. 141. Based on recording made by Joan Williams, transcribed and forword by Desmond Flower. E. R. Winn, ‘Ragtime Piano Playing: A Practical Course of Instruction for Pianists’, Tuneful Yankee 1, (January 1917), pp. 42–3. A contemporary equivalent of this might be Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox reworkings of popular material (e.g. his version of ‘All About the Bass’, ‘Oops!. .I did it Again’, etc.). Here jazz versions of popular material prove that the ontological status of the material can survive many diverse manifestations. The over-writing of these piano rolls reminds us of Conlon Nancarrow’s work’s for player piano. To get some sense of the polyphonic saturation of these, try the last movement (3e) the so called ‘Boogie-Woogie Suite’ which is a compilation of studies 3a–3e of the Studies for Player Piano, composed c. 1948. However, one of the most extreme is the later study No. 25 composed in the 1960s, as this superfast section (c. 200 notes per second), concludes with 1,028 notes played together and held with the sustaining pedal.

50 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102 103

Improvision See J. Batterson, Blind Boone: Missouri’s Ragtime Pioneer (Columbia and London: University of Missouri, 1998). Quoted after ibid, p. 44–5. Recorded in an article by M. Harrah in Ragtimer, September 1969, quoted after Batterson, Blind Boone, pp. 84–5. We might get some sense of the rag and improvisation by listening to Sidney Bachet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers’ recording of ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ made in 1932. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8ePe1AO9Lc. E. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 144. L. Gutteridge, ‘The First Man to Bring Jazz to Britain’, Melody Maker 31 (14 July 1956), p. 6. See W. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars (California University Press, 2001), p. 4. Also known as the traps (compressed from ‘contraption) the drum kit is effectively a whole percussion section of bass drum, snare, toms and cymbals (including the high-hat, a pair of clashing symbols controlled by the foot and manipulated by sticks, developed around 1926 by Walberg and Auge) all of which are controlled by a single performer, involving their whole body (both arms and both legs). To presume that this is all to simply ‘keep the beat’ (as sometimes happens in more contemporary rock and pop music) is to misunderstand the subtlety with which a good jazz drummer pulls the pulse, drops out, shifts metre and plays with timbre (the principle characteristic of non-tuned percussion). See S. Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar The Visible in Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 2. See for example E. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900–1933 (MIT, 2002); J. Donald, ‘A Complex Kind of Training: Cities, technologies and sound in jazz-age Europe’ in Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound (ed. J. Damousi and D. Deacon, ANU E Press, Canberra, 2007), pp. 19–34. As Donald writes: housing and constructing a social infrastructure, the density of public and private transport, the new types of leisure and entertainment venues to be offered to the public and the emergence of new media technologies – all these factors, and others, would have combined to produce a distinctive mix that would have made the city [Vienna] still sound different from Berlin, Paris or London. Equally, however, new sounds associated with social changes were increasingly common to all these cities, and so their soundscapes were inevitably becoming more and more similar. Perhaps as a result, the idea of sound as the acoustic genius of a place was giving way increasingly to the idea of noise as an intrusive and wiry-textured aspect of the urban environment that needed to be measured, managed and controlled.

104 For the photo see: https://www.dagogo.com/divas-jazz-harlem-seine-paris-1924-39part-1-2/. 105 For more on this remarkable musician see M. G. Carter, Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook (Oxford University Press, 2008). 106 Quoted after M. G. Carter, ibid, chapter 4, ‘The National Conservatory and the Beginning of a Musical Career’, p. 31. 107 J. Straaten, Slavonic Rhapsody: The Life of Antonin Dvořák (New York: Allen, Towne & Heath, 1948), pp. 179–80.

The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz

51

108 In his book Harlem in Montmartre (2001), W. Shack claims that Cook was to be concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but was told that, as a black man, he could would not be allowed to play solos (as was often required of the leader). There is no support for this in Carter’s biography. 109 See Carter, Swing Along, chapter 9. 101 J. Rasula, ‘Jazz and American Modernism’ in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. W. Kalaidjian (CUP, 2005), p. 164. Europe was also responsible for promoting the ‘Versatile Four’ through the Clef Club, a band consisting of two banjos, piano and drums. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfDubf6TnHc for the 1916 recording ‘Down Home Rag’. 111 Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866–1949). Studied with Dvořák on a scholarship and assisted him in copying out parts for his 9th Symphony. 112 N. Curtis, ‘The Negro’s Contribution to the Music of America: The Larger Opportunity of the Colored Man of Today’, The Craftsman (March), 1913, p. 664. 113 See for details of Europe’s life, R. Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 114 First published as ‘Sur un orchestre nègre’, in La Revue Romande, 15 October 1919, pp. 10–13. Translated as ‘On the Negro Orchestra’ in D. Albright (ed.), Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (University of Chicago Press, 2004) pp. 368–73. 1919 was also the year Ansermet conducted the première of The Three-Cornered Hat (with choreography by Massine and sets and costumes by Picasso). It was also the year Jim Europe was killed. 115 In order not to clog the text with too many end-notes, all consequent quotations in this section are from ‘On the Negro Orchestra’ in D. Albright (ed.), Modernism and Music, pp. 368–73. 116 ‘Learned music’ is presumably in contrast to ‘instinctive’ music, a common trope of primitivism. 117 On this tour they changed their name from the New York Syncopated Orchestra to the American Southern Syncopated Orchestra, playing over 300 consecutive performances and a total of 1,200 performances in England, Scotland and France. The orchestra consisted of about thirtyfive performers, including Bechet, clarinet and sax.; trumpeter Arthur Briggs; violinist Paul Wyer; and the Haitian flautist then studying at the Paris Conservatory, Bertin Salnave. In addition to dedicated singers some players also doubled as vocalists (see Carter, Swing Along, p. 104). 118 In another note Ansermet makes the interesting observation that while searching for ragtime sheet music he was shown one example which he dismissed as rather dull and lacking in character – ‘Slightly hesitant, the publisher offered me another which he designated as the model of the first; it was a remarkable thing whose accent and force of character seized me at once, but which his clientele would not have, declaring it too trying. The publisher then made the sugary replica which he had shown me first, and had withdrawn the original from circulation’ (D. Albright, ed., Modernism and Music, p. 369). Thus the difference between the original and the moderated commercial version. 119 D. Albright, ed., Modernism and Music, p. 373.

2

Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting

The laws that govern jazz rule in the rhythms of great original prose, verse that sings itself, and opera of ultra modernity. Imagine Walter Pater, Swinburne, and Borodin swaying to the same pulses that rule the moonlit music on the banks of African rivers. Walter Kingsley, ‘Whence Comes Jass?’, New York Sun, 5 August 1917

Part 1 ‘The more rhythm there is in a work of art, the closer it approximates music’, so wrote František Kupka around the year 1912.1 The following chapters engage the concept ‘Orphism’, which I am defining more widely than the art ‘movement’ with which it is customarily associated. In these chapters I use it to signify the tendency, in early abstract theory and practice, ‘to aspire to the condition of music’, both implicitly and explicitly. I describe this as the Orphic tendency in early abstract painting. In addition, I focus principally on the role jazz plays in characterizing this condition. When referring explicitly to the ‘movement’ that gave rise to the term, I use inverted commas precisely because, as a movement, it hardly existed at all. That is, its identity is limited as to overarching aesthetic predisposition, to a set of characteristics signed up to by the group of artists circling around Apollinaire. However, the idea of music did run like a thread through their work. It played a varied but important role in their thinking about what abstraction might mean in terms of their individual aesthetics. Orphism was a term coined by the critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, in the process yoking together a disparate and diverse group of half a dozen artists in whom he detected a post-cubist inclination towards abstraction. ‘This art, which strives to aestheticize the musical perceptions of nature’, was ‘the art of painting new totalities with elements that the artist does not take from visual reality but creates entirely by himself.’2 The art forms that provided the obvious formal and conceptual models were music and poetry, hence Orphism. Art historians have always found the loose conjunction of Delaunay, Léger, Picabia and Duchamp problematical. The one artist I shall not discuss in any detail is Léger, although he has, in many ways, the most explicit relationship to jazz, having collaborated with Darius Mihaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Börlin and Ballets Suédois in 1923 on the jazz inflected ballet La Création du monde 52

Orphism and a New Tune I

53

(‘The Creation of the World’).3 His relationship to jazz is well documented. What I focus on here are the more ‘subterranean’ theoretical connections and affinities in the work of Picabia, Duchamp and, firstly, Kupka. František Kupka was not explicitly drawn into Apollinaire’s group, although almost all scholars who have discussed the movement since have included him, as shall I, and in many ways he fitted most comfortably Apollinaire’s definition of Orphism.4 He is the least well known of the group, but also the one who arguably achieved the closest approximation to a fully-fledged abstraction. Like Wassily Kandinsky, the artist who usually claims the abstractionist laurels outside ‘Orphism’ (but very much inside the Orphic tendency), Kupka worked out his aesthetic ideas systematically, in textual as well as in painted form; his book La Création dans les arts plastiques was written in the same years, 1911–12, as Kandinsky’s more famous Über das Geistige in der Kunst.5

Orpheus The concept of Orphism is rather complex, not only in its original formulation by Apollinaire, but also in the fact that it escaped the control of the poet, becoming more widely applicable among critics following its coinage. Kupka himself recognized this and, while keeping a distance from Apollinaire, he followed the wider idea, or the orphic tendency. He later wrote, ‘It was in 1911, I created my own uniquely “abstract” way of painting, Orphism, disregarding all other cultural systems except that of Greece.’6 An orphic trend in modernism has also been identified by R. H. Abraham under three main themes: the creative significance of chaos (e.g. birth and turbulence); the organic unity of nature (both physical and spiritual, the formal vocabulary of abstraction); and the attraction of opposites (male/female, horizontal/vertical, arabesque/straight line, etc.).7 The idea is also manifest in Goethe’s Urworte. Orphisch, written in 1817, inspired by J. G. J. Herrmann’s interpretation of the orphic tradition in terms of five forces governing human life: Daimon (Destiny), Tyche (Chance), Eros (Love), Anagke (Necessity) and Elpis (Hope).8 I have discussed elsewhere the links between the movement and Orphic cults in ancient Greece, especially in relation to Kupka,9 but here it is worth adding another small detail. In the early 1920s Kupka produced a series of illustrations for a deluxe edition of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which was published by Blaizot in Paris in 1924. The series is significant because, according to Margit Rowell, these illustrations allowed Kupka to modulate away from contemporary French art (mainly cubism) and move towards a full form of abstraction, although his work had for some time before this been experimenting with abstraction.10 The edition of Prometheus Bound was translated and introduced by Lucien Dhuys, who presents therein an original interpretation of the Promethean myth. Dhuys reads Prometheus as an avatar of Orpheus. He argues that the Titan signified a decisive period in Greek thinking, which he sees as comparable with the switch between the Old and New Testaments. Prometheus represents a challenge to the Olympian gods, introducing the possibility of change and, indeed, of humanity’s victory over destiny. The philosophy based on the power of the human spirit was named by Dhuys as ‘Orphism’:

54

Improvision The orphic magus . . . taught the evolution of natural forces surging out of the primordial chaos, slowly organized in order to create, with their last effort – man – in whom they attained consciousness. Orphism thereby unveiled the power of the spirit, which was formerly oppressed by matter, but which returns again, exalted by a strange force, and subdues the matter which created it.11

This is also reminiscent of Elisée Reclus’s statement in The Earth and its Inhabitants (1890): ‘Man is Nature becoming aware of itself.’12 We might also recall that Nietzsche links Prometheus and Dionysius: ‘This Titanic impulse to become the Atlas of all individuals, and on one’s broad back to bear them ever higher, even further, is the bond that unites the Promethean and the Dionysiac. In this respect the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysiac mask.’13 Later Nietzsche was to conflate Zarathustra with Dionysius, and Prometheus reappears as the model for the super-man in The Will to Power.14 So Prometheus, Dionysius and Orpheus are pulled together to model an approach to the building of a new cultural rhythm, to develop a creative power, to regenerate and revivify. For Kupka the quest for a utopian unity, a bringing together of parts, an aesthetic synthesis, and this orphic-inspired text, is significant, as will become clear as his synthetic aesthetic is explored. The idea of Orpheus in the early twentieth century is potent, and largely consequent on the Symbolist milieu in which many of the artists moved, centred on the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse. It is not my intention to investigate all these strategies, to draw out natural history or ‘nature-philosophy’, but rather to draw out the idea of Orphic power of art to move, stirring the soul and the world, through the vital power of music and art: as Apollinaire expressed it in a lecture in 1908, ‘The new Orpheuses, the young poets of whom I have been speaking, will soon compel your admiration, making the very stones and wild animals sensitive to their tones.’15 Kupka, as a resolute individualist, proclaimed vehemently against his alliance with any movement or ‘ism’. Nevertheless, his Orphic credentials are evident, even as he shunned membership of the ‘movement’.16

Jazz modernism When I previously discussed Kupka’s work in Visible Deeds of Music, I did so in relation to the music of J. S. Bach, because Kupka explicitly mentions the German composer as a model. Here I do not want to focus on the exemplar of Baroque polyphony or the teleology of absolute music, rather I want to show the ways in which ideas that were emergent in the modern musical form of jazz (and those styles that fed into it) shadowed early practices of abstraction. My proposition here is that Orpheus was a jazz musician. Or at least, he had more in common with early twentieth-century jazz musicians than he did with those who accorded with the paradigm of absolute music. This is not to claim that jazz directly influenced all these artists,17 steering their thoughts towards abstraction. Rather, I want to explore the concordance of jazz with the techniques that accorded with the aesthetic priorities of early visual abstraction.

Orphism and a New Tune I

55

Music is not unitary, but multiform, and its different ‘modes’ operate in different ways.18 Further, jazz is not antithetical to absolute music, and binaries should be engaged with care, as discussed in the previous chapter, because jazz shares many of absolute music’s proclivities. Jazz is, after all, an aesthetically structured sound form, a moving aesthetic force, a mix of harmony and rhythm, polyphonic and polyform, and, more problematically but equally indicatively, ephemeral, temporal, etc. Jazz in the early twentieth century was, nevertheless, often positioned as antithetical to ‘elite’ culture. Jazz as ‘noise’ was perceived as the opposite of ‘real’ music. Synonymous with popular culture as it was, to critics like Clive Bell it was an attack on the nature of culture itself, an ‘impudence which rags’, in his phrase.19 His conception, as we saw in the Introduction, told of its fashionable transience and its imminent passing. What he failed to appreciate was how trenchant it was, and how it would continue to modulate, to go on to form an art-music of modernism itself. From the viewpoint of a century later, we can see that what Bell was railing against was a thin conception of jazz as a metaphor for a type of modernity to which he objected. In the intervening century jazz has become even more multi-form, complex and global. Bell’s account is an attack on a phenomenon of the popular, not on a species of music in any full conception. His diatribe offers no account, understanding or analysis of the sound, structure, techniques or methods of jazz. Far from being antithetical to other types of music, therefore, jazz could be positioned at the very nexus of musical languages, in constant dialogue with popular culture and the avant-garde, always jostling with its traditions. Jazz does not necessarily avoid the territory of classical (and all the musics that involves), anymore than it avoids any other music (‘world’, popular or folk). As Morton’s earlier quote puts it, ‘jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune’. While absolute music tries to disappear through the score, it fails through the score’s very visibility, the conductor’s interpretation of it, and its transmission through a silent, gesturally compulsive, physical, visual presence. Jazz most often has no visually present score or ‘director’. Instead, jazz focuses on improvisation and an aural heritage, replacing the physicality of score/author and conductor/agent with the physicality of the performer and their image recorded in photographs. Thus, the image of jazz is part of its definition.20 This dance that music has with visibility and invisibility plays a central role in its ‘condition’ to which other arts might aspire. Obviously this is problematic in relation to the so-called visual arts. But this condition of invisibility, however impossible to achieve, was nevertheless desired. As Daniel Chua has put it in his study of absolute music, ‘At the turn of the 19th century music became invisible. In fact, the sight of music was so abhorrent to the Romantics that they viciously pulled out the eyes of music so that it would speak with the wisdom of a blind poet.’21 Despite this, the visual always shadows sound, as I explored in Eye hEar. Moreover, to speak as a blind poet was to maintain no purity at all, but to evoke lexis in melos and thus to sully the clarity of the absolute. Of significance here is not just that jazz shares aspects of this failed absolute, it also deviates from it and its aspirations. Absolute music, while aiming for a music of the spheres, circulates around the visual heart of the score as arbiter of meaning and significance. Jazz, contrarily, circulates around the variability and visibility of the performance and is grounded in the body. Both musics, classical/absolute and

56

Improvision

jazz/popular, play as much with visibility and invisibility as they do with sound. Understanding the similarities and differences allows us to offer a more nuanced understanding of what it meant for art to aspire to the condition of music in the early years of the twentieth century.

Montmartre to Puteaux The visual world of abstraction as it emerged in painting in the early twentieth century, and the emergent sights and sounds of jazz, both developed in the same city, Paris, and to a large extent, even in the same district. Montmartre was, by the second decade of the twentieth century, both an artists and a musicians’ quarter. In fact, lower Montmartre was often known as ‘Black Montmartre’, due to the large numbers of black jazz musicians (mostly demobbed American troops) who settled there after the war. Prior to this it had been for some time an area dominated by peasants and a few members of the bourgeoisie, mostly landowners, farmers and market gardeners. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century it maintained a generally high rate of poverty. Principle among the artistic inhabitants of Montmartre in the early part of the century was Pablo Picasso, who moved in 1903 into the Bateau-Lavoir, a rundown house in the 18th arrondissement, a rather dangerous neighbourhood. Also living there were the artists Kees van Dongen, Amadeo Modigliani and Juan Gris, the writer and painter Max Jacob, writers André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy, and the novelist and composer Pierre Mac Orlan. With his growing reputation, and the support of collectors like Wilhelm Uhde and wealthy Americans like the writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, Picasso eventually, towards the end of 1912, moved to the south of the city, to a studio on the Boulevard Raspail, next to the cemetery in Montparnasse. However, a number of important figures remained behind in a smaller artists’ colony in Montmartre, among them his friend and cubist collaborator George Braque, the painter and son of Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo (who was unusual among the avant-garde in that he was actually born in Montmartre), and Picasso’s compatriot Juan Gris. Gris was at this time good friends with another group in the circle of a young artist who had recently moved to Paris from Normandy, Marcel Duchamp. In October 1906, after a year’s military service, reduced from two years due to his quick training as an engraver and typesetter; (les ouvriers d’art were regarded as an ‘essential profession’ and he qualified for a shorter conscription), Duchamp settled into a flat in the 18th arrondissement at 65 rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, just down from no. 73, where the sculptor Rodin was to move four years later, and ten minutes from Bateau-Lavoir. However, Duchamp’s brothers, Raymond and Gaston (later Jacques Villon), and his sister Yvonne had recently moved from Montmartre to the quieter rural suburb of Puteaux, about 8 kilometres from Montmartre, just across the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne and Neuilly. Raymond’s brother-in-law had found a group of inexpensive houses with artists’ studios sharing a common garden in rue Lemaître. The three Duchamps, together with Gaston’s former neighbour in Montmartre, the Czech artist František Kupka, moved into three of them, thus creating a small, alternative artists’ colony, where they were joined by Francis Picabia around

Orphism and a New Tune I

57

1911. This ‘Groupe de Puteaux’ or, as they were also known, the ‘Section d’Or’ (on the suggestion of Villon), included Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay. Thus Marcel, rather indicatively, spent his time moving between two groups of artists, those in Montmartre around Gris, and those around his brothers and friends who held Sunday meetings to discuss art, science, philosophy and aesthetics (‘Dimanches de Puteaux’ as they were called). These discussions were also regularly attended by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. This quickly became a site of much sophisticated discussion of art theory and the emerging aesthetics around cubist and post cubist non-mimetic and abstract painting. The central figure for the consolidation of these theories was Apollinaire, who wrote Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques between 1905 and 1912, publishing it in 1913. Apollinaire had a curious relationship with Kupka, as he did with Duchamp and Duchamp’s close friend Picabia. These three have also often been seen as the ‘odd men’ of Orphism. All three also sat awkwardly with orthodox Cubism, or at least the species represented by the ‘Section d’Or’. What Apollinaire appreciated, about Picabia and Duchamp at least, was their more anarchist spirit. However, he found it difficult to build a rapprochement between the seeming formalism of Delaunay and the Puteaux group, and Picabia’s and Duchamp’s more radical experiments with image and text, a less ‘pure’ aesthetic, and their explorations of boundaries between art and writing. One key area of contact that seems to have united Picabia, Duchamp and Apollinaire, however, was their respect for the role of humour in aesthetics. In contrast to the more serious deliberations of the ‘Section d’Or’, irony and irreverence, and the ennobling model of Alfred Jarry, proposed an alternative aesthetic to that of the tragic muse. In many ways, key seeds of Dada were sown in the artistic intercourse at this time between Apollinaire, Picabia and Duchamp. František Kupka (1871–1957) stood on the side-lines of this, or indeed any group. He had been born in Opočno, a small town in Bohemia, then part of the AustrianHungarian empire. He studied art in Prague, and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (where Egon Schiele was to become a student a few years later), before settling in Paris in 1894. In Paris he continued his education studying at both the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. By the time he moved to Puteaux in 1906 at the age of 35 (the year Duchamp was 19 and Picabia 27) he had, therefore, received a thorough academic training and had worked as a successful commercial and satirical artist and illustrator for a number of magazines and newspapers. In this same year he also exhibited at the Salon d’Automne for the first time (where Kandinsky also showed over 20 works).22 He stands apart from both Picabia and Duchamp in his commitment to spiritualism and theosophy, although for a short period Duchamp appears to have been drawn to many of these spiritual ideas, as evidenced in his Portrait of Dr R. Dumouchel, 1910,23 and a concomitant interest in alchemy.24 Kupka was of a grave disposition, with great seriousness of approach, in contrast to the sometime tongue-incheek irony of his younger colleagues. Nevertheless, he shared with them an interest in the fourth dimension, ideas of abstraction post-cubism, and an intense individualism (connected to political anarchism) which shunned membership of groups, movements or ‘isms’. While the differences between them would ultimately lead them in very different directions, for a short period they shared an approach and set of aesthetic

58

Improvision

priorities, which in no small part revolved around the relationship between art and music. These ideas, whether consciously or not, often shared the emerging challenge to aesthetic conventions offered by what was becoming known as jazz. This shared agenda involved concepts of rhythm, improvisation (as a rapprochement between calculation and intuition), the phenomenology of body and art, and an aspiration to abstraction.

Jazz abstraction, and jazz as art It is not just ‘absolute’ music that can signify as ‘abstract’. Jazz also manifests abstraction.25 In 2001 the musician and artistic director of jazz at the Lincoln Centre New York, Wynton Marsalis, described the early jazz of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver as ‘some of the most abstract and sophisticated music that anybody has ever heard, short of Bach’.26 What does abstraction signify in this context? On the one hand it means the same thing it does in relation to absolute music, it is the condition that Pater refers to as that to which all (modern) arts should aspire: a contained conception, removed (abstracted) from what lies beyond it as sound and form. There are fundamental problems with this claim qua the identity of music, but there is no denying it operated as a very powerful ambition within the rhetoric of early abstraction.27 In relation to early jazz another idea is also being invoked: improvisation. In Joseph ‘King’ Oliver’s improvisations there is a focus on the development or ‘play’ with a given theme; a recasting, in effect, of the given melodic line, what has been called ‘referential improvisation’. As Gunter Schuller has explained: In all early New Orleans performances the original composition played a predominant role in the ‘improvisation.’ The younger men like Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Johnny Dodds gradually broke away from the theme-improvisation concept, and after the mid-twenties, solo improvisation, with few exceptions, came to mean extemporizing on chords rather than melodies . . . Oliver was a master of this type of referential improvisation.28

This ‘referential’ (or paraphrase) improvisation is mimetic in relation to its ‘original’, or, to put it another way, the melodic recasting resembles the ‘outline’ of the original. It needs to be emphasized that it is through this referencing of the original that the music derives its expressive power. The improvisation is effectively a set of variations on this original melodic line, but due to music’s character and its existence as sound, this is a special musical case of ‘abstract mimesis’. Mimesis here refers to an already abstract object (a melody) rather than an object out in the world (although it is that too). In many ways this is exactly what Kupka pursued in his development and variations on abstracted visual forms, as arabesques and vertical arrangements; he was seeking an analogue with this kind of improvisatory abstract mimesis. As Schuller has already mentioned, this type of improvisation was taken in a more ‘abstract’ direction by the next generation of jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong. In the same broadcast as Marsalis’s description of Oliver and Armstrong as abstractionists, Matt Glaser, the jazz and bluegrass violinist and artistic director of the

Orphism and a New Tune I

59

American Roots Music Progam at Berkley College of Music, makes the additional but related claim that Armstrong’s contribution to the history of jazz also lies in his ability to ‘abstract’ a melody spontaneously, to ‘remove all the unessentials (sic) from the melody and be left with just this pure vision of what the melody could be’.29 This is not to be understood as simply a question of formal reduction, but rather one of expressive communication. Philip Harper has argued that key to this expressivity and abstraction is an understanding of extemporization and ‘voice’ in jazz. ‘Voice’ is linked to instrumental timbre, which has always been a central means of expression within jazz, much more so than in classical music.30 The concept of aesthetic timbre (or colouring) in jazz is central to an instrumentalist’s identity, and for an early pioneer like King Oliver this was to be heard in his oft remarked ability to make the trumpet ‘speak’. ‘Speech’ in this context is to be understood as the instrumental ‘vocal’ inflection of the timbre of the trumpet, fostered in Oliver’s case by the creative use of mutes and innovative wa-wa effects, achieved by the use of a rubber plumber’s plunger, or a bowler hat, or even a cup that allowed him to conjure a talking trumpet. In this way he achieved an abstracted mimetic effect, a type of urspeech. Technically the wa-wa (and later harmon mute, used to great effect by Miles Davis) filters treble frequencies, producing what Robert Erickson has called ‘a modification of the vowel quality of a tone’.31 This produces a voice-like sound that reinforces the idea of music as a type of lingua franca, or as ‘a language intelligible with absolute directness, yet not capable of translation into that of our faculty of reason . . . express[ing] the inner most nature of the world’.32 While Schopenhauer’s point is one common to all music, the abstract mimesis of instrumental dialogue in jazz performance adds a further dimension to the language analogy. And while the ‘speaking’ of instrumentalists through timbre and phrasing (a ‘conversation’), is not unique to jazz, it can be especially effective in the live, improvised exchange, adding to the impression of a ‘spoken’ language, which relates back to the discussion in the previous chapter of scat and instrumental timbre. As explained by Schuller, a development of this ‘referential’ improvisational expression was advanced by Oliver’s protégé, Louis Armstrong. He evolved improvisational etiquette beyond that of group interaction to true solo improvisation and thus developed a signal feature of modern jazz. This move to the fully expressive individual solo was perhaps the most significant shift in the transition of jazz from entertaining dance music to art music. His rhythmic flexibility, in counterpoint to the underlying pulse, his harmonic inventiveness, and what James Dapogny has summed up as ‘the cogency of his technical innovations, each solving a particular problem faced by the jazz soloist and his untiring wealth of lyric improvisations, enabled him to extend his solos for several choruses and to structure entire performances’,33 combined to produce a music of feeling. In this move jazz becomes an art, a sophisticated form of personal expression. As Schuller has put it ‘By whatever definition of art – be it abstract, sophisticated, virtuosic, emotionally expressive, structurally perfect – Armstrong’s music qualified.’34 This is manifest, according to Schuller, in four main ways: note choice in improvisation; quality of tone; rhythmic phrasing; and note embellishment (decoration, vibrato, trills, etc.).35 Schuller’s definition of swing – the placement of notes within the time continuum and the attack and release properties of his phrasing – serves as a

60

Improvision

general definition of the rhythmic drive of jazz, the fluidity with which musicians precisely place notes in the rubato flow of the phrase (I discuss this further in chapter 4). As he says of Armstrong’s ability: Armstrong was incapable of not swinging. Even if we isolate a single quarter [quaver] note from the context of a phrase, we can clearly hear the forward thrust of that note, and we recognize the unmistakable Armstrong personality. It is as if such notes wish to burst out of the confines of their rhythmic placement. They wish to do more than a single note can do; they wish to express the exuberance of an entire phrase.36

This is what makes the improvised phrase so compelling, and has also been explained in relation to his technique of increasing the ambitus of vibrato after the attack of a note, what Dapogny has described as giving ‘an accumulating energy and a kind of interior rhythm to individual notes and an additional propulsion to an entire phrase’.37 Try the 1928 recording of ‘West End Blues’ by Armstrong and his Hot Five. Improvisation in jazz moved, with Armstrong, from the elaboration of a melody or theme, or what in another context might be called ‘ragging’ (although this would only relate to rhythm) to melodic expression and original invention over a harmonic base. This bass (and base) was provided by the ‘original’, the solo was harmonically and rhythmically developed on and sometimes against it. Armstrong had what Harper calls a ‘solo individual auteur approach’.38 This signature style of invention moves jazz beyond simple dance music to a form of expression founded on music’s abstracted condition; ‘the abstractness that music epitomizes redounds to the self-actualizing potency of the musician who discloses it, and thereby emerges as a contributing factor in the assertion of artistic subjectivity’.39 The jazz solo becomes a form of individual self-expression. In this way the abstraction of jazz becomes an especially potent analogue for the aspirations of artistic abstraction. Ideas around abstraction demonstrate cognate ideas to what Appel has called ‘jazz modernism’.40 It is this same soloing quality that Klee conjures in his memorable phrase ‘Eine aktive Linie, die sich frei ergeht, ein Spaziergang um seiner selbst willen, ohne Ziel’ (an active line, moving freely, on a stroll on its own, without destination).41 This is often paraphrased as ‘taking a line for a walk’, but that misquoted phrase betrays the improvisatory intent of Klee’s careful wording. Klee is proposing a line that is free, inquisitive, playful, propulsive and dynamic, temporal, no longer in the service of the mimetic, no longer descriptive of something outside itself. Such a line allows him to re-engage with improvisation, as he wrote in his diary as early as 1908: ‘Now that I have been strengthened by my naturalistic studies, I may dare go back to my native bent – psychic improvisation.’42 This is not Leonardo’s absence of line in nature, ‘[a] line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object’.43 Klee’s line is real, if abstract. It may be a modernist flâneur with a spontaneous sensibility, but it is not insubstantial, it is fundamental. It is propelled by an inner rhythm, a self-sustaining dynamism, as is Armstrong’s musical line. In Solo for a Brown Line this is what Kupka sought too. New directions in modern art were conducted on spatio-temporal lines (not divorced from the concepts of rhythm and gesture), the nature of technical practice

Orphism and a New Tune I

61

(not far from the role of improvisation), and were about the role of the figure (or the lack of it) in the syntax of modern painting.

Dance and new rhythms The Puteaux group, including Kupka, Picabia and Duchamp, became immersed in debates and ideas circulating around the practice of Cubism and what (might) come after. Kupka was an inveterate student, studying myth, theosophy, philosophy, and modern ideas in science. He attended physiology lectures at the Sorbonne and worked in biological laboratories to gain a wider knowledge of contemporary scientific argument. He is especially unusual in the avant-garde in seeking a hybrid and synthetic aesthetic that merged science and spirituality. What Duchamp and Picabia and the Puteaux group more generally shared was an interest in the philosophical implication of ideas around the fourth dimension, together with an interest (to a greater or lesser extent) in the ideas of the philosopher of time and memory, Henri Bergson. However, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson has so thoroughly documented, individual views on mathematics, number, and ideas around the fourth dimension within the Puteaux group were varied, and a unified picture would be hard to paint.44 However, concepts of the fourth dimension can be said to have encouraged artists to move away from mimesis, and in so doing to abandon the conceit of single-point perspective, which, together with a resurgence of interest in idealist philosophy and ideas of temporality, supported the role of music as a central paradigm for the development of an abstract aesthetic. This was an aesthetic that, while also abstracted from the needs of mimesis, was more grounded in rhythm, timbre, physicality, and conflicting notions of the primitive, which related both to an aspiration to seek a fundamental language, and to a shift from the classical paradigms of western art to seek out a new aesthetic, sometimes mechanical and modernist. The idea of a new rhythm appears in many guises. In the opening of his 1910 essay ‘Note on Painting’, Jean Metzinger writes the following: Is there a work among the most modern in painting or in sculpture that does not, secretly, submit to the rhythm of the Greeks? Nothing, from the primitives to Cézanne, has been able to break away definitively from the chain of variations that connects us to the hellenic theme. These days I see yesterday’s rebels prostrating themselves unthinkingly in front of the bas-relief in Eleusis. Goths, Romantics, Impressionists, the old measure has triumphed over your admirable departures from rhythm [arythmés]; but your labour was not in vain. It has established in us the presence of another rhythm. The Greeks invented the human form for us. It is up to us to invent it again for others. This is not a matter of a ‘partial’ movement that has to do with known liberties, liberties of interpretation, of transposition etc. These are half measures! What we need is a total emancipation.45

62

Improvision

Metzinger is not alone in detecting the need to shift from an old to a new rhythm and requiring it to constitute a complete shift in aesthetics. The temporal rate of change increased with modernity, and one of its most urgent signifiers was jazz (even when not explicitly acknowledged). More than this, jazz embodied, enacted and seduced rather than simply signified. It felt rhythm; it did not signify on the surface, it pulsed through the body infecting it with a new beat, it was contagious. Its virulence is what made some critics reluctant to admit they were affected; jazz was often seen as a virus. As one contemporary critic put it: ‘The group that play for dancing, when colored, seem infected with the virus that they try to instil as a stimulus in others. They shake and jump and writhe in ways to suggest a return of the medieval jumping mania.’46 We saw in the previous chapter that Ansermet was among the first critical commentators in Europe to recognize the felt nature of syncopes and rhythm, which he considered the genius of jazz. It was seen as jazz’s central characteristic and defined its authentic musicians (such as Bechet and Armstrong), musicians who felt, or ‘got’ rhythm (swing or ‘groove’ as it would later be called). The ‘truth’ of this music was recognized from the start as phenomenological by Ansermet: ‘They are so entirely possessed by the music they play that they can’t stop themselves from dancing inwardly to it in such a way that their playing is a real show.’47 Inward dancing, an analogue for the internalization of the rhythmic swing, it is this that allows the appropriate placement of notes within the rhythmic flow or continuum of improvisation. In the early years of the century jazz and ragtime manifested themselves in the guise of the cakewalk and other dances (as introduced in the previous chapter). This was a dance which offset balance in an analogical way to the offsetting of pulse by syncopation. It ‘unhinged’ the body.48 The attraction of dance as a subject for modern art was in great part a consequence of the fact that it amounted to a direct manifestation of the visualization of jazz and new rhythms more generally. It is no accident that Stravinsky’s the Rite of Spring was a ballet. The movements of the body were a visual analogue for the abstract rhythms and gestures of the music. This is an important notion, that the rhythm was felt and played out in the body, increasing its potency as an amplification of the syncopation; the sound doubled in sight. But even when ‘silent’, the visual depiction provides evidence of the materialization of new rhythms through the disclosure of the body. This can be seen clearly in Marcel’s elder brother Jacques Villon’s print Le cake-walk des petites filles’ of 1904,49 an image of his young cousins dancing the cakewalk (see Figure 2.1). Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Villon produced a great many posters of contemporary forms of entertainment. The influence of their grandfather Emile Nicolle, an etcher of architectural views, was important, and Villon became a print-maker of considerable significance (for Marcel it was mainly an issue of gaining les ouvriers d’art as mentioned). This print, while one of over 175 intaglio plates he produced between 1899 and 1910, of Parisian society at the turn of the century, also demonstrates the extent to which contemporary experiences penetrated the intimacy of the domestic everyday. The young girls pivot in answer to each other, with serious expressions, eyes fixed up and down, prancing in a homely space of green carpet and floral wallpaper. Given the primitivist assumption mentioned in the previous chapter, that black culture was both closer to nature and represented a more innocent, unconscious, unschooled form of expression, it was not

Orphism and a New Tune I

63

Figure 2.1 Jacques Villon, Le cake-walk des petites filles (trial proof), 1904, drypoint and aquatint in colours, 30.5 × 41.9 cm.

uncommon to see such a dance equated with children. Debussy composed his ‘Gollywog’s cakewalk’ in his ‘Children’s Corner’ for his daughter around the same time (1908).50 Nevertheless, formally, the balance provided between the counterpoint of the two girls, the seriousness of their expressions, and the flat planes of green and unprinted paper, do articulate the power of an asymmetrical rocking rhythm, although the high level of finish in relation to their heads presents a disparity between mind and body; a discontinuity that might occur to a disinterested Cartesian watching a cakewalk. In contradistinction to this childish image (but no less strong, underlining the usual paradoxical assumptions of racism), is the belief that such new dance moves originated from supposed Bacchic or instinctual movement. In the previous chapter I mentioned the belief that cakewalk dances had ‘no rules’, they were simply performed ‘spontaneously’, and fed by a ‘fundamental/sexual’ impulse. It should not be surprising that dance in general features as a common subject of artists around this time: a subject that represents elemental expression. Even when they are not directly painting such dances as the cakewalk, the same primitivism is often invoked. For example, Matisse’s major Fauvist canvas Le Bonheur de vire (The Joy of Life 1905)51 features a flowing rhythmic dance of naked figures in the centre of the work, repeated and amplified in his later La Danse (1910),52 and both the Ballet Russe and Isadora Duncan simultaneously developed choreography around ideas of myth, maenads and fauns: half-human, half-animal

64

Improvision

followers of Dionysus. The idea that the cakewalk might have been an authentic twin of such expressions, performed by moonlight and involving sexual abandon or quasireligious ecstasy, only magnifies such associations. Bacchic dance features in Picasso’s and Derain’s painting, and later in Stravinsky, Roerich and Nijinsky’s 1913 ballet, Le Sacre du printemps. The issue of Dionysian ideology will be taken up below. Metzinger was probably the most theoretically inclined of those artists working in a cubist context. He knew Picasso and Braque and had met Apollinare by 1907, through their mutual friend Max Jacob. The Puteaux group also discussed literary ideas such as unanisme (Jules Romains), as well as science and technology. They joined the poetic Abbaye de Créteil group and the Symbolist Cloerie des Lilas circle together with Apollinaire and the mathematician (and insurance actuary) Maurice Princet. This potent mix of ideas and expertise produced a hybrid aesthetic that is central to abstraction as it emerged in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. In order to understand the link with rhythm and dance it is, however, important to consider the way in which ideas about ‘movement’ and the ‘fourth dimension’ developed around Puteaux. While others have discussed fourth-dimensional ideas in the cubist context in detail, I am mainly concerned with how a new conception of rhythm might signify.53

Part 2 Kupka František Kupka is a key figure in the linkage between the Dionysian discussion of music and ideas around the fourth dimension. As mentioned, Kupka had an uneasy relationship to Orphism and those artists around the Section d’Or. He did not wish to be identified, or constricted, as a member of a particular movement or group, even though his work at this time is in many ways emblematic of Orphism. He did not want to be called an Orphist or a Cubist, and Apollinaire generally obliged. He was the neighbour of Jacques Villon in Puteaux, and while only four years older than Jacques, he was eight years older than Picabia and sixteen years older that Jacques’ younger brother Marcel, when they moved there in 1906. But perhaps the most significant difference was that Kupka was also a practising medium and a Theosophist (this he shared with Mondrian). However significant his spiritualism might have been, his aesthetic was drawn from ideas shared across the Puteaux group, and in many cases similar conclusions were drawn, even when outcomes were different. Kupka was concerned to explore sense perception through its translation into paint, informed by his powerful interest in mythical and spiritual ideas, and new thinking in science. This wide mix was perhaps only matched (but not mirrored) by Duchamp. The concept then circulating of a higher, fourth-dimensional reality was not as surprising for the spiritually inclined Kupka as it might have been for some other, more geometrically inclined cubists. He wrote in his notebook around 1911: ‘One could speak of apprehensions, of visionary intuitions, of an ultrasensitive film, capable of sensing (seeing) even the unknown worlds of which the rhythms would seem

Orphism and a New Tune I

65

incomprehensible to us.’54 ‘Intuition’ is the vehicle of understanding and the translation of this is from rhythm to sight. This interest in the visual translation of hyperspace philosophy, as Henderson has argued, also influenced Duchamp. Indeed, Duchamp much admired Kupka, and his Nude Descending a Staircase is a unique (among cubists) realization of the representation of motion that may have developed out of discussions of hyperspace with the older artist in Puteaux.55 However, both artists were essentially interested in representing a complex and ambiguous pictorial space, rather than just motion in space. The mature aesthetic of each artist was, however, almost antithetical. Kupka’s motive was towards the construction and justification of a completely abstract art, one that rejected the representation of three-dimensions in two-dimensions as superficial. Kupka sought a new syntax of representation in which rhythm and intuition were key and were developed in tandem with two contrasting formal themes, circular forms and vertical planes. Firstly, there is a series of works based on the development of disks and arabesques, seeing the latter as the ‘rhythmic chant of the spirit’;56 organic forms that evolved from his first experiments around the La Petite Fille au ballon of 1908–10, which modulated through Le Premier Pas (1910) and Les Disques de Newton (1911) to a painting that has a claim to being the first publicly exhibited work with no discernible external syntactical references, Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs.57 It was developed through the course of more than fifty studies, and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne of 1912.58 Despite the number of studies and preliminary works, Kupka still made significant alterations to the structure of the final version of Amorpha while he was painting it – the dialogue and the intuitive interaction between painter and image in the act of painting was significant.59 The concomitant formal theme Kupka worked on was the counterpoint to these images of circular arabesque movement and was the representation of sequential movement by means of vertical planes. He wrote: The different body positions, the voluntary or automatic movements that we make in the course of our life, are so many ways of situating ourselves in space . . . In an upright position, we place ourselves from top to bottom. In walking, we feel the height of the body following the balance of the limbs . . . The upright body is a vertical in relationship to the ground. It only suffices to recline in order to have an entirely different sensation of the space around us. The plastic arts are admirable in the way they offer a concrete confirmation of these great lines of orientation, which followed point by point, can initiate us to the reading of space. Invisible lines are nonetheless present . . . To seize and to hold them, that is the exploit of Bellerophon for the artist . . . He must look for and find the means of materialising abstractions, of giving a real consistency to all the movements and states of his interior life. In this way art assumes form and is enriched with new aspects.60

The body is central to Kupka’s aesthetic, it mediates between the material and abstract, the spirt and the artist, the vertical and horizontal. This series of vertical paintings started with the figure in Les Cavaliers (1907), the sequence of Femme cueillant des fleurs (c. 1910–11) resolving in Nocturne in 1910, a bold and daringly

66

Improvision

Figure 2.2 František Kupka, Nocturne, 1910, oil on canvas, 66 × 66 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. Poto © mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Wien.

reduced canvas of lavender, blue, green and grey vertical strokes graduating from a heavier, darker-toned bass at the bottom of the image, to the lighter-toned, shorter strokes at the top of the composition (see Figure 2.2). The two paintings Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs and Nocturne function as end-points of one creative process, and as springboards for a new series of creative explorations for which the governing paradigm was the model of music. The development was probably accomplished more intuitively than this teleology might suggest and involved more than just ideas about music, but it is those on which I am focusing. As for all abstract artists, the only door into this world of abstraction was through mimetic representation. A key image here is his Piano Keys/ Lake of 1909 (see Figure 2.3). This work, while closely related to earlier paintings such as The Other Bank (1895, Prague, National Gallery) and The Lake (1902, Paris, private collection) stands at an important crossroad in his aesthetic language. I discussed this painting, and the works leading to Amorpha, in Visible Deeds of Music, and do not intend to replicate that here, but I want to add a supplement. One of

Orphism and a New Tune I

67

Figure 2.3 František Kupka, The Keys of the Piano (Lake), 1909, oil on canvas, 78.2 × 72 cm, Prague, National Gallery, Inv. no. O 3790. Photo © National Gallery Prague, 2020.

the most remarkable things about this image is, while grounded (at the base of the composition) in harmony, it is developed through the rhythmic iteration of the keys as they resonate up through the centre of the composition. This rhythmic gesture dissolves the lake scene; the pulse of the notes spread to blur the mimetic depiction of boat and water. The pictorial space is compressed, pulled together (towards the picture plane) by the hanging foliage and the advancing keys. The black and white contrast sets a beat that is echoed in the painting of the foliage at the top of the image. In addition to ripples and vertical movement, the image also evokes suspension. While movement lies in the disruption of the fictive image, the true picture plane presents the stasis of black and white horizontal strokes. Kupka wrote of the vertical: ‘There is all of the majesty of the static in the vertical. It connotes both above and below, and reunites them, at the same time that it divides the space horizontally. Reproduced in a series of parallels, the vertical becomes an agonizing silence that expands horizontally.’61 Stasis is twinned with music in the myth of Orpheus. When he descends into the underworld Ovid writes of the effect of his music, the cessation of all activity:

68

Improvision All with his words, the music made the pale phantoms weep: Ixion’s wheel was still, Tityos’ vulture left his liver, Tantalus tried no more to reach for the water, and Belus’ daughters rested from their urns, and Sisyphus climbed on his rock to listen. That was the first time ever in all the world the Furies wept. 62

Together with the sound is the silence, twinned to the movement and stasis. The image oscillates between music and image, sound and silence, movement and stillness: ‘We represent space either as an expanse defined by material limits or as an unlimited expanse, abstract, analogous to the idea we have of emptiness . . . and of silence.’63 As I mentioned in Visible Deeds, it is possible that this work reflects in another sense. It ‘reflects’ a pun used by Duchamp a couple of years earlier. The pun here is the homophonic play between piano à queue (grand piano) and piano aqueux (watery piano)64 (see Figure 2.4). What Duchamp has done is to use the coincidence of sound to split meanings. What Kupka does, more seriously, in Piano Keys/ Lake is to use sound to split the image into mimetic and non-mimetic. The role of sound is key here (pun intended), as it is the sound that ‘betrays’ the fixity of language in Duchamp’s image. The rhythmic iteration of the keys vibrates and shimmers the painting, dissolving its representational qualities, representing it as abstract form. One of the principal reasons for the ubiquitous recourse to music in early theories of abstraction is that music, while not language, was meaningful. What abstraction sought to establish was a type of representation between image and meaning akin to that between sound and meaning in music. Necessary here is the step of loosening the bonds of meaning, breaking up the relationship between means (or media) and object (work/subject). Both Duchamp and Kupka are doing similar things, but in characteristically very

Figure 2.4 Marcel Duchamp, Flirt, 1907, pen wash and blue pencil on paper, 31.4 × 45 cm, with inscription: She: Would you like me to play ‘Over the Waves’? You’ll see how well this piano conveys the impression the title suggests. He (wittily): Nothing odd about that, Mademoiselle, it’s a watery piano. Photo by Bacci Attilio. Copy print received from Galleria Schwarz, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp, 1973, 1967–79, undated, Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Records, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives.

Orphism and a New Tune I

69

different ways. There are no words in the Kupka image, but the expression of the title outside it is worth pause: Touches de Piano, Lac is its most common form. The use of a virgule (comma) provides an equivalence between both halves, piano keys and lake. Sound and light are seen as interconnected through vibration. What is more, touch is only one letter away (toucher) in the title, but present in the fingers on the keyboard; the image is a study of the senses, a hybrid of sight, sound, touch and the scent of flowers. But the aspiration to abstraction also pulls them together into a form of equivalence or correspondence. This is a procedure similar to that recommended by Raymond Roussel (whose play Impressions of Africa, was seen and discussed by Picabia, Duchamp and Apollinaire in May 1912): invention based on the pairing of two words taken in different senses. As the method developed I was led to take a random phase from which I drew images by distorting it, a little as though it were a case of deriving them from the drawings of a rebus . . . This method is, in short, related to rhyme. In both cases, there is unforeseen creation due to phonic combinations. It is essentially a poetic method.65

That artists set on reinventing the language of art should also turn to lexis and melos, language and music, as aids to thinking, is not surprising. What is significant is that, in the process of this investigation, synthesis and integration of media were also sought. Duchamp desired a way of integrating visual and textual languages on the basis of ‘the ideogram of the Chinese language’.66 Kupka, on the other hand, wanted to ‘find something between sight and hearing’.67 In both cases an expansion of media was sought through a species of inter-media. For Duchamp, this ultimately lead away from painting in the direction of art, but for Kupka this meant the development of a vocabulary of abstract forms and marks. This resort to a language of gesture will be taken up later, but equivalence mediated by mark-making, in whatever guise, is of considerable significance in the move to abstraction. This link between gesture and rhythmic integration is what Touches de Piano, Lac seeks to enact: an interaction between the mimetic and abstract, as well as between sound and vision in the form of vibration. This linkage of gesture, line, language and music is perhaps best summed up by Emile Donce-Brisy, who wrote the following in the introduction to a portfolio of prints by Kupka’s friend the artist Féliz Del Marle (1889–1952), but which equally applies to Kupka: There is only one art: Music. Everything is rhythm: musical or plastic. To the melodic line inscribed in time corresponds the plastic line, the element of special movement . . . For the line is movement . . . It is language, sign or symbol. It is the graphic expression of rhythm. There is hardly an idea, hardly a wish, a dream, or an emotion that cannot be translated by a line.68

Kupka has pursued this idea in linear form in a number of works that followed on from the arabesques of Amorpha. These works have no relationship to observable nature, instead they provide analogues for musical forms. Two important works date

70

Improvision

from the same year, 1913: Solo of a Brown Line and Insistent White Line.69 Both these images have been described by Ludmila Vachtová as ‘concerned with the analysis of human gesture’. In addition she suggests they supplement ‘those passages in La Création dans les arts plastiques which deal with the relationship between sensory impressions and motor activity in the act of painting, and with the function of the hand as executor of brain impulses.’70 She also, as before, tries hard to distance these works from the example of music, again because she, like Kupka, does not want them simply to be seen as ‘illustrations’ of music. Nevertheless, the title and gestural dynamic of the images compel analogies, which need not weaken their effectiveness qua visual images. Kupka wrote: ‘The line is nothing less than one of the most essential factors in our conception of plastic form. You could compare it to the baton of the orchestra conductor, conducting the materiality of expanses.’71 The graphic line shares the dynamic of the musical phrase described by the conductor’s felt gesture. Klee articulated the same impulse in his Pedagogical Sketchbook, perceiving the innate graphic character of a conductor’s physical gestures and expressions. This is similar to the (learnt) intuitive approach of Louis Armstrong as we saw earlier. He is best known as the creator of ‘the coherent solo’ (to use Wynton Marsalis’ phrase), what the trumpeter Roy Eldridge called storytelling: ‘every phrase [Armstrong played] led somewhere, linking up with the next one, in the way a storyteller leads you on to the next idea. Louis was developing his musical thoughts, moving in one direction. It was like a plot that finished with a climax.’72 At a technical level there is no need to go into detail here as others have done that,73 but this sense of design and impetus can be seen even in a unit of two bars. Take the 1928 recording of Basin Street Blues. In Box 2.1, the two bars on the left represent two bars of the melody, the two bars on the right Armstrong’s solo over that same melody. This fragment of the melody consists of only two notes and two harmonies (D and A, and D major7 moving to G major7). Effectively what Armstrong does with this fragment is arabesques around the melody note of D squeezing it with the chromatic notes of C sharp and E flat on either side, giving the line forward motion by phrasing V7 to I preparing the G7 in the second bar. Brian Harper makes the telling point that such an approach to soloing as Armstrong’s was an aesthetic choice, and one that deviated from the more mimetic ‘novelty’ approach of most of his predecessors – not necessarily better, any more than abstraction is better than figuration, although both musical coherence and abstraction have been privileged by formalist aesthetic discourses in terms of value. ‘Novelty sounds’ mimic ‘the horse neigh’, ‘the baby cry’, ‘the laugh’ or ‘the sneeze’, to give examples quoted from a contemporary treatise, The Novelty Cornetist by Louis Panico in 1923. In contrast, Armstrong’s approach derived instead from a formal

Box 2.1 Louis Armstrong, Basin Street Blues as written and as played (1928).

Orphism and a New Tune I

71

understanding of the musical structure, as Esten Spurrier recognized around the same time: [Armstrong] ‘departed greatly from all cornet players . . . in his ability to compose a close-knit, individual 32 measures with all phrases compatible with each other’.74 In fact, as Harper shows, Armstrong used a variety of approaches to soloing, some of which varied little from version to version, some stuck close to the original melody line and harmonies, while others ventured far and wide, but, as Harper sums up, ‘the fact remains that Armstrong traversed the rhetorical gap between two-bar break and fulllength solo with a structural eloquence generally unmatched by his peers’.75 The dynamics of these lines, painted or musical, might also remind us of Henri Bergson’s point about the relationship between gesture and inner mental states: ‘our mental state is ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these inner movements . . . they would never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay’.76 The fluid nature of these marks aspires to the spontaneous, improvised nature of the effective melodic jazz solo. One more point is worth making here. The reason, according to Bergson, why something becomes comic is a consequence of gestural failures. He writes, ‘The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.’77 For Bergson, organic life is antithetical to the mechanical, and the success of such gestures are that they should flow, not be automatic. Repetition produces a mechanical effect. ‘This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.’78 This may seem somewhat distant from Kupka and painting, but Bergson’s philosophy was much discussed in Puteaux and his point is more generally relevant, because the machine analogy is central to modernity and the intuitive artistic response to ‘mechanical reproduction’. For such abstract artists as Kupka and Kandinsky, gesture resides in the nature of the mark and how this relates to the viewer. It is to be empathetically felt and ‘answered’ in the viewer, and its authenticity would be undermined if it were to become ‘merely mechanical’; it would not connect subject to subject, but become simply objective. Central to Kupka’s aesthetic is the ambition to produce a sense of dynamism in the mind of the viewer: ‘to give the impression of movement using means that are themselves immobile [by] playing with different degrees of intensity of evoked impressions [the artist can] simulate a sequence that doesn’t exist’.79 This is done by colour but also gesture, line. We will return to this issue of the mechanical below in his Hot Jazz paintings. In Le Trait Obsédant (1913–23) the line appears to have a greater tempo, moving across the canvas and back on itself, standing out against the more harmonic, impasto background of browns and greys.80 A strong contrast between the well-worked background forms and the whiplash of the white line provides a vivid counterpoint. In Solo d’un trait brun (1913) a ‘melodic’ line emerges from the ensemble, describes an arabesque in suspended space and then re-enters the ensemble in the fashion of an improvised jazz solo – specifically a ‘stop-time improvisation’, which Harker describes as ‘a routine borrowed from tap dancers . . . essentially a series of contiguous solo breaks punctuated by accented downbeats in the ensemble’. He goes on in relation to the previously mentioned Louis Panico [who wrote the Novelty Cornetist], that he considered stop-time improvisation particularly difficult because it compelled the

72

Improvision

Figure 2.5 František Kupka. Solo of a Brown Line, 1912–13, oil on canvas, 70 × 115 cm, Prague, National Gallery, Inv. no. O 3825. Inscribed bottom left: ‘Le solo d’un trait 1912–13 Kupka’. Photo © National Gallery Prague, 2020.

soloist to ‘keep on going’, that is, to sustain the flow of original material beyond the confines of the two-bar break.81 What Kupka similarly does is allow the line to break free from the accented downbeats. The echoing of the forms from which the line emerges, and to which it is subsumed, in the twists and turns of the line itself, relate well to the analogy of melody and harmony suggested by the title (see Figure 2.5). As we saw with Piano Keys, the use of words is important to Kupka in his theoretical writings, but also in the titles of his works. Kupka’s titles have, however, given art historians little pause. Solo functions in much the same way as Nocturne, for example. Both titles signify a general state, playing alone and evening, respectively, and they are the titles of musical works. The best known precedent for this is to be found in James McNeill Whistler, who developed ‘musicalist’ titles in order to draw attention to the formal qualities of the paintings beyond the depiction of specific subjects, as in Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge.82 Here the ‘abstract’ harmonization of blue hues and highlights of gold is given focus above the subject to which this colour arrangement is related (Battersea Bridge). As Whistler himself put it: ‘As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.’83 The evocation of an inter-art analogue is not a simple matter of translation, just as Kupka was reluctant to have music too simply invoked in relation to his painting. Siblík, Kupka’s first biographer, suggested music was an important influence because the pianist Walter Rummel used to visit Kupka and play Bach, which may well be correct, but says nothing about the nature of influence.84 What is going on is not a simplistic formalism that says painting is about colour and mark-making, as music is about harmony and melody. Rather, it is an issue of the deferment of meaning; the

Orphism and a New Tune I

73

keeping of it, literally, in circulation, moving issues of meaning across arts – music is poetry, painting is poetry.85 Meaning resides in the constant analogical traffic between media. It is not earthed, but constantly deferred, as the analogy can as easily be reversed – poetry is music, painting is music, etc. Duchamp was drawn to similar techniques, but by very different means. This is why this is not a simple case of synaesthesia (neither Whistler or Kupka were synaesthetic in any clinical sense), but it is a desire to reach across media to points of common concern (a type of cultural synaesthesia).86 While the paradigm of music was of central significance for Kupka during these early years of abstraction, the cultural backdrop was provided by the sights and sounds of jazz. However, jazz does not explicitly emerge as a model for Kupka until the 1930s, although Vachtová mentions a painting entitled Jazz Movement (1928), the single work from this series selected by Kupka for his retrospective exhibition in 1946.87 He did, however, paint music-hall and cabaret subjects in the early part of the century. On arrival in Paris in 1894 he followed a not unfamiliar path in order to make a living: he worked as an illustrator for fashion magazines. Like Gris and Duchamp, among others, he was engaged by both the worlds of fine art and popular art and illustration. These two worlds mutually informed each other, and popular cultural topics carried over into his fine art practice. In 1904 he produced a series of illustrations for the anarchist journal L’assiette au beurre on African gods and religion. In these works he attacked the injustices of white colonial rule, describing a black heaven ejecting white devils and in general attacking superstition and oppression through the technique of ‘inversion’, as Patricia Leighten has shown; a typical anarchist device for pitting the ‘savage’ against the ‘civilized’, identifying the former as African, the latter as colonial.88 His earlier painting, Cabaret Dancer of around 1900, shows the same bright yellow pallet as in his more well-known portrait The Yellow Scale (c. 1907, Houston). Cabaret Dancer is probably a portrait of the dancer Louise Weber, known as ‘La Goulue’ (the ‘Queen of Montmartre’), a performing star at the Moulin Rouge who introduced Kupka to this new popular world.89 In addition, Kupka produced a series of images of ‘Gigolettes’ (young prostitutes) and their male partners in these early years (c. 1909), standing, dressing and dancing, often in exaggerated ‘primitive’ poses, and with overstated features, usually in profile, ironically recalling the Renaissance convention which provided female subjects with a virtuous distance from the world and the viewer.90 These images were based stylistically on his study of Greek vases and the art of Crete and Mycenae, drawing the primitive and modern into alignment. Patricia Leighten has argued that these early subjects of the ‘dark side’ of modernity, generated by his anarchism, stand in contrast to the abstract works which oppose them in their spontaneous, intuitive freedom.91 What links some of these themes, I would suggest, are the jazz images, which allow for a more complicated, contested modernism of two faces; primitive and modern, spontaneous and mechanical. As part of the machine works he produced from the mid- 1920s to the early 1930s, suggested by the experience of visiting the factories of his patron Jindřich Waldes, he pulled another pair into alignment: nature and modernity.92 The energy, physical beauty and rhythm of machines is linked to the energy, rhythm and bodies of jazz. While these works were not to lead Kupka in a direction he chose to continue, and he did not publicly exhibit them, they represent a significant station on the path of his aesthetic development, a synthesis and reconciliation of contrasting elements.

74

Improvision

On the way to his more abstract paintings, we find the vertical, rhythmic element in black and white that emerged from the ‘figured bass’ of Touches de Piano/Lac integrated with his other dominant formal motif, the disks in works of the early 1930s. Disques noirs syncopés of 1930, for example, draws on the formal innovations of the ‘vertical plane’ series, while developing an irregular disposition of the black disks and white circles, which creates a sense of syncopation across the image. This theme of disarticulated circles is a characteristic of the Lissitsky-influenced93 Circulaires et rectilignes (1937, Prague, National Gallery) , and the two Divertimento paintings of 1938, both in private collections, which in turn ‘owe their horizontal format, intricate rhythms and deviation from the primary color scale to a group of pictures on the theme of jazz’,94 executed between 1935 and 1937. There is further evidence that Kupka regarded the vertical and circular compositions as complementary. He invented a word, ‘symorphy’, to refer to the pictorial synthesis of different forms, as ‘symphony’ is a large-scale development and integration of musical forms.95 The bringing of these elements together is notable in the canvases Synthesis (Prague, National Gallery, 1933), Music (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1936) and Jazz-hot no. 1 and 2 (both Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1935). Another painting of 1933 bears another invented word as a title, Eudia. This concept relates directly to the role of rhythm and demonstrates how Kupka felt he was forging new territory, not only in the images themselves, but also in the concepts that might help to explain them. In this context, the emergence of an ’interart’ aesthetic, that sought to explain one art form in the terms of another, is an unsurprising development. Of ‘eudia’ Kupka said this: Greece gave us Eudia, measure, a sense of proportion and rhythms; [Greece] gave us rational knowledge, but could not and never will transform our tendencies toward intuitions, sentimentality, dreams . . . The spontaneous rhythm [created] by the repetition of proportions represented by lines or plans is like the assemblage of motifs on a printed fabric. The conscious and desired rhythm, harmony, Eudia of all my components.96

A central aim of his aesthetic ambition was this ‘spontaneous rhythm’, a felt rhythm that is characterized as swing in jazz: the intuitive placing of rhythmic elements in anticipation, contradiction or delay of the beat or pulse, a push and pull within the temporal continuum. The tango is a dance of circular and linear movement and features in earlier paintings on similar themes, Lines and Planes in Tango Rhythm (1928, revised 1934, private collection), and two versions of Bock syncopé (‘Syncopated Glass of Beer’ no. 1 (in Paris) and no. 2 (location unknown) (1928–30).97 Although the two paintings Hot Jazz were dated 1935, it is likely they were started as early as 1927 and, according to the catalogue of the Centre Pompidou, when Bock syncopé no.1 was exhibited in Prague in 1946 it was under the title Jazz Movement.98 This suggests that the whole series, irrespective of specific title, was (tacitly) based on a similar jazz ideology and rhythmic articulation. These works are part of a larger series of pictures based on the subject of machines. This topic of machine imagery, also developed by Picabia and Duchamp and in another direction by Léger, flows from Orphism in complex ways to be further discussed in the

Orphism and a New Tune I

75

following chapters. For Kupka the series culminates in two canvases on the explicit subject of jazz. This series has proved problematic to Kupka scholars and to the teleology of the artist’s own claim to abstraction. However, considering these machine paintings in concert with the themes of jazz, movement, primitivism and rhythm exposes important points of contact within a broader ‘musicalist’ modernism.

Painting machines and jazz The exact dating of paintings around this time is difficult because Kupka never publicly exhibited his ‘machine’ pictures. He felt equivocal about this minimal return to figurative subject matter and away from nature, and from 1926 to 1933 he did not exhibit at all at the Salon des Indépendants. He wrote ‘I don’t know if my returning to content is a good thing, I hope it is clear that the painting comes first, not the idea.’99 However, again Kupka emphasizes the ‘performance’ of painting above the content, the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. His concomitant attraction to machines was to the rhythmic abstraction of mechanistic forms of pistons and wheels (see early among these works The Machine Drill, c. 1929, Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza), their parts reconfigured to make new pictorial wholes, the contrast and polyphony of the rectilinear and circular elements. These paintings reconstruct machines, reconfigure their parts and need to be seen both in relation to Kupka’s aesthetic and the context of the later 1920s. This period represents both a maturing of the perception of jazz, indeed the arrival of the ‘jazz age’ to use Fitzgerald’s phrase, but also a drive to recuperate jazz within a post-war ‘return to order’. Here it is important to point out that the relationship between jazz and machine-age classicism, pursued simultaneously by Kupka and the Purists, emphasized the primitive as encapsulating a reduction to essential elements and an emphasis on geometry and rhythm. This was argued to be, by Le Corbusier’s musician brother Albert Jeanneret, manifest in a ‘natural tendency towards measure and rhythm’, and that ‘strict meter’ was a sign of ‘modern mentality’.100 Jazz here is not opposed to a new classical order, but through mathematics and the ‘restoration of a principle of economy’ it becomes a model for modern art. As Le Corbusier saw it, ‘Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythms of the machine. It is in two-part time; tears in the heart; movement of legs, torso arms and head.’ And his description of Louis Armstrong is worth quoting at length as he sees the trumpet player as directly embodying this phenomenon: He sings, he guffaws, he makes his silver trumpet spurt. He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean! . . . he roars and puts the trumpet in his mouth. With it he is in turns demonic, playful and massive . . . . The man is extravagantly skilful; he is a king.

He concludes, ‘the Negro orchestra is impeccable . . . a beautiful turbine running in the midst of human conversations. Hot jazz.’101 While this rhetorical flourish could be used to describe some of Kupka’s jazz images, the ideology of celebrants of purism and mechanical production stand to one side of

76

Improvision

Kupka’s aesthetic conception. This rationalist approach, conditioned by modern machine methods, works against Kupka’s conception, which was based on the more familiar trope of jazz as ‘instinctive’ and driven by the passions rather than the intellect. For him the work of art is an organism arising from the process of creation, which is an alternative reality to that of the outside world, understood in a tacit way: ‘we must paint, sculpt, build as if we were to get to know art inside out through our own efforts – or as if we had never known it’.102 The relationship with tradition is therefore one of tension, it is through an awareness of tradition that an artist goes their own way, deviates from it. However, the conversation between a jazz performer and the tradition of which they are a part is analogous to this: it is in the departure from the stable transmission of past meanings that improvisation gains significance and acquires new meanings: ‘In time, stocks of ideas get exhausted, and classicism only produces poor, crippled offspring.’103 Kupka’s approach is not that of purism. However, Kupka was drawn to the machines of music making, and, as mentioned earlier, jazz was a music of the record and gramophone in a way no other music was. The theme of the tango had been pursued earlier by Kupka in a more figurative guise in a pastel image of 1909, the same year as Touches de Piano, Lac. In Lines and Planes in Tango Rhythm (1928), for example, Kupka added abstracted gramophone parts. This referencing of machines for making music occurs in a painting simply entitled Music (1936), which is dominated by a large circular shape that resembles both a gramophone turntable or record, and the punched disk of a music box propelled by the gears and cogs interlaced at the bottom of the image. Here music is signified through its machines of reproduction, rather than an evocation of the effect or experience of the sound of music, as is the case in Amorpha. We shall see a similar engagement with technology in the very different abstract paintings of Arthur Dove (in Chapter 4). Kupka’s use of the idea of music as an analogue to abstraction was also intuitive and connected to felt experience. For example, a significant work of 1926, Energetics II ,104 demonstrates a dynamic series of asymmetrical jagged forms on a horizontal format indicative of the earlier Solo of a Brown Line. While it has been suggested that this may represent a fugal structure it is also possible that its interlocking, jagged lines and planes prefigure the jazz images. It is closely related to Énergique sur fond violet (1926) and shares, in its brown, white and black angular lines the forms of the later watercolour, étude pour La Douceur de vivre (1933). Another work from around this time, Black Smile (1929/1934), joins the circular motif with strong vertical and horizontal elements, with a more painterly Z figure which, within the composition, could almost be from the word jazz. Indeed, the title links it to étude pour La Douceur de vivre and its abstracted grinning figure (see Figure 2.6). It is this strange juxtaposition of a black waiter with other paintings of machine parts and the two explicit jazz images, that forms a link between the otherwise incompatible subjects of the so-called ‘machine’ paintings. To give but a sample of these titles: Steel Slowing Down (1923–6), Working Steel (1926), Machines (1929), Levers (1929); some related to machines and food; Drinking Steel (1927–9), Distillation Apparatus (1929), Life is Sweet (1929), Cakes (1929), and then music related ones Singing Steel (1926), Jazz Movements (1928), Hot Jazz I and II (1927–35), Music (1936) linked by Syncopated Glass of Beer (1930) and ones with anthropomorphic titles (that reference the waiter or dancer in a club), Black

Orphism and a New Tune I

77

Smile (1929), Smile O (1933); although it will be noted that elements of shared iconography relate all these mentioned works to each other.105 Another key image in this series is Syncopated Accompaniment (staccato) (1928–30). This painting, however, has a much higher degree of abstraction than some in the series. When it was sold by Christies in 1996 under the title La petite méchanique it was dated later than others, to c. 1930. However, it is a slightly smaller variation on the same theme of Bock syncopé no. 1 (ou Rythme heurté).106 The smaller work has a high degree of impasto, but is very similar in composition and tonality, but both have an interest in syncopation (jerky rhythm/rythme heurté) and machine parts. The idea of syncopation, off-beats and asymmetrical relationships structurally link the majority of this series. However, the series can be seen to circulate around the iconography of the small work already mentioned, étude pour La Douceur de vivre (1933) (Figure 2.6). This strange little watercolour shows most clearly the visual vocabulary of the ‘jazz’ and machine works, and elements crop up in other paintings across the entire series. In some ways it relates back to the Villon print we considered earlier, for it shows a figure in a white shirt and black jacket, possibly a waiter (or a drummer, or a dancer?), pivoting on two striped legs with crocked arms in a rocking pose, not unlike the cakewalk danced by the two sisters. But this work makes explicit the reference points of the more abstract canvases; for example, the black and white legs appear to feature in Énergique sur fond violet (c. 1926) and its associated studies,107and in a number of images in the Quatre Histoires De Blanc et Noir (Paris, 1926, pp. 11–14). There is also a racially stereotyped grinning face, and the grin and lips are echoed on the far right of the image. This half disk is clearly repeated in Bock syncopé and is present in a number of

Figure 2.6 František Kupka, étude pour La Douceur de vivre, 1933, watercolour and pencil on paper, 20 × 33 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou inventory no. AM 2755 D (R). Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI., Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Georges Meguerditchian.

78

Improvision

earlier oils, e.g. Machine comique (Paris, 1927–8) and Synthèse (Prague, 1929), and perhaps most clearly in the painting called Cakes (Paris, 1929),108 which appears to represent a (pair?) of black (racially stereotyped) waiters in black jacket and white tie, with check trousers. Kupka’s obvious enthusiasm for the rhythmic complexity and interplay of these paintings seemed to blinker him to the almost cartoon-like exaggeration of this type of racial caricature, a feature he may have adopted from popular contemporary jazz posters (for example those of Paul Colin).109 Black musicians were the catalyst for the shift to this syncopated rhythm, and while Kupka may have been unaware of the social injustice many of them experienced, he was sensitive to the rhythms of the body in motion, an organic machine. The obvious similarity between this group of images suggests that a number of the rhythm-focused machine cycle of works draw parallels between the moving, dancing body of a black figure and the rhythmic movement of modern machines. In addition to machine rhythm, Kupka saw a fundamental relationship of rhythmic organization running through all of nature and the human body. This series of paintings couples the machine and the human body in rhythmic articulation. The underlying geometry bonds all these forms together. As Kupka wrote in La Création dans les arts plastiques: In observing the conformation of the human body, we find always the same curves which recur and repeat everywhere. The more individuals we have the opportunity to get to know, the more different permutations of these linear relationships do we see – masters of harmony from which we can extract completely novel conclusions, just as with plants and trees which, it seems, obey the same law of rhythmical unity. Never cease to draw on the inexhaustible source of nature.110

The two jazz paintings are in many ways the culmination of this series of machine/ body-inspired paintings in that they are the most formally integrated and the most abstracted. The studies for them111 show their derivation from more explicit machine imagery, especially the Étude pour Jazz-hot (AM 2795D),112 with the clear drawing of a spanner at the bottom and top towards the right (see Figures 2.7 and 2.8). The abstract rhythm of the forms eliminates the mechanical representational elements in the final two paintings and produces a more unified surface. It is possible, nevertheless, to discern abstracted and disjoined elements with figural remains, beyond pistons or gears: there is a guitar with a squared body and fret board (upper left), a pianist’s arm (centre) a cymbal (far left and bottom right) and a protractor (upper right) in the first canvas. The second work (No. 2) is even more devoid of possible figurative referents, except perhaps for a cymbal (far right) and a keyboard (below far right) and the vaguely organic coils of material (mid left). However, the point is not the ‘decoding’ of abstracted figural elements, but rather the awareness of the integration of the various forms, their modulation across the canvas and the harmonization of the colour palette. Both paintings share the same pink and lilac palette, with black and white accents and brown and gold elements, and both have the same dimensions (60 × 92 cm). The palette of these paintings is interesting, given the title hot jazz. With such a title we might have expected more primary colour, but what we are presented with is primarily tertiary hues, accented with black and white. It was always Kupka’s intention to keep a visual distance from too literal

Orphism and a New Tune I

79

Figure 2.7 František Kupka, Jazz-hot No. 1, 1935, oil on canvas, 60 × 92 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/JeanClaude Planchet.

Figure 2.8 František Kupka, Jazz-hot No. 2, 1927/1935, oil on canvas. 60.5 × 92 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou. Photo © Centre Pompidou. MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ image Centre Pompidou, MNAN-CCI.

80

Improvision

depiction, not to draw the viewer to a consideration of the known world, so much as to provide them with an opening of the imagination to an unknown or ‘spiritual’ one. This concept was a shorthand for the idea of a plane of significance beyond the physical, to which, for example, following Schopenhauer, music had privileged access. Jazz was appropriate because of this emphasis on rhythm, but also for its complicated relationship to the body and ideas of the mechanical and the ‘mechanistic’. It is in this way that we are to understand the concept of ‘hot jazz’ as equivalent to ‘authentic’ jazz (following contemporary French usage in Goffin and Panassié, and Charles Delaunay, as will be discussed below). Understood in this way, the paintings relate to ideas of the intuitive, a spontaneous expression, to the idea of a kind of ‘divine grace’ in expression. While the images are not entirely spontaneous in terms of construction (they, like most of Kupka’s major works within his oeuvre, follow a great number of studies), but the experience of the viewer in front of these modestly sized paintings should be one in which the eye can move about intuitively and rhythmically, spontaneously plotting a route through and across the forms.

Hot jazz The French use of the concept of ‘le jazz hot’ is inextricably bound to the club and magazine of the same name. The club was founded in 1931 by Jacques Bureaux, Jacques Auxenfans, Elvin Dirat, Charles Delaunay (who was the secretary general) and Hugues Panassié, the president (as Jazz Club Universitaire, changing its name to Hot Club de France in 1932). The magazine started up in 1935 (and has claim to being the first exclusive jazz magazine in the world). From its inception the club was dedicated to the promotion of traditional Dixieland jazz, emphasizing both the relationship of jazz to European music and its African-American origins in New Orleans. There was a famous schism in 1947 over Delaunay’s support of BeBop and Panassié’s abiding dedication to Dixieland. The conception was, however, that hot/authentic jazz draws on an ideology of ‘native’ divine grace, that links strongly to a primitivism that assumes jazz expression is essentially unlearned and unschooled, even unteachable. According to Panassié it can only genuinly be felt in the black body, not the white. If it is taught or studied it will not have the flow of ‘hot’ jazz. So, while it may be ‘authentic’, it also fulfils a species of essentialism and racism. Kupka’s relationship to such ideas of subconscious or spontaneous creativity are, however, complex. He believed that the subconscious is supplied with imagery from the observation of nature, and this study was, and should be, conscious and deliberate. Such studies provide the memory with information and in the process are translated into ‘cerebral’ images, which, to quote Virginia Spate, ‘are more “dear” and more “obsessive” because their origin is unknown’. However, as she goes onto explain he [Kupka] emphasized that ‘subconscious creation’, based on the accumulation of subjective images, was inferior to a work created from a knowledge of form which the artist could acquire through his studies. Kupka stated that the first studies in the creative process were too close to the ‘cerebral image’, and that the artist ‘must proceed by [using] sketches . . . plumbing the original image deeper and deeper in

Orphism and a New Tune I

81

order to understand the elements on which his given image was founded.’ This part of the process was analytical, but Kupka warned that the ‘fundamental first image’ might be weakened by too much speculation. Kupka stressed the significance of the subconscious sources of individual forms, but laid no less emphasis on the inner necessity of developing a structure, of finding ‘functional’ relationships between forms, and thus creating what he called a ‘morphological unity’.113

This approach is effectively restated in different terms in the later words of the jazz musician Arthur Rhames, as quoted in Berliner’s study of the creative process of jazz improvisation: Improvisation is an intuitive process for me now, but in the way in which it’s intuitive I’m calling upon all the resources of all the years of my playing at once: my academic understanding of the music, my historical understanding of the music, and my technical understanding of the instrument that I’m playing. All these things are going into one concentrated effort to produce something that is indicative of what I’m feeling at the time I’m performing.114

What Kupka sought was a rapprochement between study and intuition, and in the many studies he made in preparation for his major paintings it is possible to observe the evolution of this process closely. In the intellectual circles of Puteaux the ideas of Bergson supported this interest. For Bergson all human action demonstrated varying degrees of freedom, depending on whether they were instinctual, pragmatic, intellectual or intuitive. Intuition for Bergson was an especially artistic characteristic, which was emphasized through willed empathy. Creativity is the product of freewill that has escaped habit (or coercion) and is thus in concord with élan vital, not only reflecting but also contributing to its development. As Bergson put it, ‘Life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation.’115 Kupka’s ambition was to tap this vital energy and to make it visible. Improvisation is key here because it allows the ceaseless motion of élan vital without trying to stand outside it, an experience of the real (rather than of the illusion) that slips past symbolism. Music was an analogue that helped Kupka (among others) to think this through. Fundamental mark-making comes with the birth of the decorative; ‘these strokes intertwine, engendering angles, curves, circles in an expressly rhythmic language’.116 A rhythmic language explicitly relates marks to temporal expression. Kupka had written of the relationship between music and art, and like Kandinsky he saw it as an especially appropriate vehicle for the expression of interiority and creativity. Music could provide a way of thinking that brokers an aesthetic relationship between physical existence and spiritual transcendence. But this does not mean art forms are simplistically equivalent: Music is a remarkable stimulus for the colourist. It would be good, however, to be more circumspect as heretofore in judging analogies between colours and sounds, and not to take for granted all the theories advanced on the subject . . . The fact is, that listening to a piece of music evokes in everyone different images, an accompaniment which everyone derives from the reserves of his own memory.

82

Improvision That is to say that chromatics in music and musicality in colours have no more than metaphorical value.117

But metaphorical value is not so insignificant. It is through the circulation of metaphorical reasoning that inter-arts thinking creates value and meaning. This aesthetic is separate from the material world and therefore an inter-art explanation is most appropriate: ‘Art expresses itself in composing its own organism. The work of art possesses a specific organic structure, entirely different from that which is found in nature . . . art, such as we understand it, resides integrally in the subjective givens, in the complex of ideas and the states of the soul.’118 And for Kupka (and Kandinsky), following Schopenhauer, music through inspiration and spontaneity most effectively represents the state of the ‘soul’. As Kandinsky put it in contrast to Kupka: ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul.’119 Some Kupka scholars, notably Ludmila Vachtová as mentioned, have denied music influenced the artist at all, she boldly claims, ‘there are no affinities to music in his work’. Then she immediately contradicts herself, ‘Kupka was interested in music and he admired Bach’s structure.’120 What she means, I think, is that the relationship between his art and music is not to be reduced to a simple issue of translation; he was not in that sense interested in ‘painting music’. Music is never, for Kupka (and most other abstractionists for that matter), an issue of the simple transference of sensation from sound to sight (a rather thin and pointless activity). Vachtová concludes that [art historians] have ‘expected Kupka to proceed with musical analogies and found him contradictory and inconsistent’.121 However, this is not really a problem, unless a rather narrow notion of what musical influence might mean is employed, and much of this influence was transmitted below the surface at an abstract level, both visually and theoretically. Art is synthetic, but not necessarily synaesthetic in a strict sense, although it is in a cultural sense. Music is found in art in rhythm, movement and harmony, the shared vocabulary and elements of art. Music was a way of helping Kupka think about abstract forms and creative organization, and in this context, the power and significance of metaphorical relationships should not be underestimated. That he gave two of his paintings the title ‘hot jazz’, another ‘jazz movements’, and another ‘music’, not to mention ‘fugue’, ‘syncopation’, ‘solo’, ‘piano’ and ‘orchestration’, ‘composition’, etc.,122 is indicative of the belief that music offered a powerful metaphorical model, an analogue of creativity. The concept of orphism, to which he felt intellectually sympathetic, if politically ambivalent, nevertheless described the power of art and music to move and affect nature; it was above all the power to move, in all senses of the word, and animate. Kupka strived to the same ends, to separate imitative work from true art. He wrote ‘We have to try to separate two incompatible elements, that is to say the imitative work, which today is superfluous, from art itself. This is the realm of rhythms and signs too abstract to be captured easily and which form a leitmotif of all compositions.’123 Rhythm and leitmotif are common to all art. That Kupka should be drawn to all types of music and that he was attracted to the powerful, physical rhythms of jazz should be no surprise, as his art sought to develop signs that might represent and evoke these abstract and shared forces.

Orphism and a New Tune I

83

Le Jazz The assumption of a particularly close relationship between black music and its supposed relationship to work and ritual is key. This was made evident in one of the first full length studies of jazz in French (indeed in any language), Le Jazz, written by André Schaeffner, with a contribution by André Coeuroy, and published a few years before Kupka’s paintings, in 1926.124 This is essentially an anthropological study of jazz, which looks to explore origins rather than contemporary forms. It is therefore an investigation of the tribal roots and the consequent forced encounter, between enslaved West Africans’ music and European music, that forged jazz (later identified as ‘American music’). The book considers musical characteristics, musical instruments, the nègre voice, the birth of jazz, and the relationship between Africans and Americans. Here the assumption is that African Americans are part of a shared nègre identity, a shared racial inheritance that persists despite experience of diaspora.125 This book appealed to, and provided evidence for, the same modernist interests in locating a point of origin as we see in a range of fields; for example, the aspiration to a language of abstraction in Kupka and Orphism; the disclosure of atonality126 as a musical step beyond the tradition of tonality; the search for a common ancestor of existing languages in Alfredo Trombetti’s book, L’unità d’origine del linguaggio, published in 1905, and so on. Schaeffner’s book opens with a chapter entitled ‘Musique pure et musique élémentaire’. The relationship between mechanized modern life and the rhythm of machines was also, according to Schaeffner, the rhythm of work. Rhythm becomes felt, then transferred to percussion as a simple extension of the organic relationship between labouring (black) bodies and the rhythms of work, most obviously in the call-and-response of work songs (although this musical pattern is found widely dispersed among many musical cultures). Because it was the body, rather than the mind, that was engaged by such work, jazz in turn becomes configured as a ‘primitive’, if modern music. Machines, in turn, extended the experience of these work rhythms to modern workers. As Jeremy Lane has shown, this is not simply the equation of Africa: instinctive and unsophisticated + America: intellectually sophisticated and modern = jazz; instinctual, primitive and yet also modern. Rather, Lane demonstrates that Schaeffner is suggesting something more subtle, that ‘the West, under the impetus of the developments of machine-age modernity, was itself reverting to a primitive state, [but that such transformations were] . . . entirely salutary, sweeping away staid Western conventions, so that art might no longer atrophy in its separate autonomous sphere but be reintegrated into the praxis of everyday life’.127 Thus, the discourse of jazz can become a part of the solution, rather than, as it was for some, limited to a simple symptom of the modern disease. As Lane goes on, Robert Goffin’s study of jazz, Aux Frontières du jazz, written a few years after Schaeffner’s in 1932 and often credited as ‘the first full-length critical book treatment’128 of the topic, takes up elements of Schaeffner’s arguments. These are principally the mix of the primitive and the modern, progressing to explore the main mechanism for the dissemination of live jazz, the nightclub. Nightclubs had grown out of the cabaret, such as the Folies Bergères and Le Chat Noir, and the music hall, such as the Moulin Rouge. Nightclubs were modern spaces of encounter, outside more formal mechanisms of control. In addition, they were spaces of mixture, where artists, writers,

84

Improvision

musicians and intellectuals could, and did, meet and exchange ideas. The sexual frissons that existed alongside these exchanges, in dance and music, helped bolster the ideology of a simultaneously quintessential modern experience and a return to more primitive and unpoliced instincts and desires.129 In this way Goffin, too, proposes jazz as a discourse of purging, as Lane explains: Goffin thus figured jazz as possessing a salutary, destructive force analogous to the destructive force of the war in its capacity to generate a kind of moral and cultural tabula rasa, sweeping away older notions of social propriety, sexual morality, and gender identity. Jazz, like mechanized warfare, was an expression of the machine age’s tendency to return human subjects to a more primitive state.130

This accords with Schaeffner’s analysis, usefully summed up by Lane on the one hand [Schaeffner contended] that the machine age, understood as the end product of Western rationalism, had provoked a return to a more primitive state seemed to undermine and invert conventional hierarchies between the West and Africa. On the other hand, his emphasis on the irredeemably primitive nature of jazz music and musicians appeared to reinforce those very racial hierarchies131

The other important modern vehicle of dissemination of jazz, but not as a live, visceral and varied an experience as the nightclub, was via the objects of the gramophone and the record. By the 1920s the 78rpm disk was established as the standard technology for the popular transmission of music and speech, and was used as much for the distribution and dissemination of anthropology and field recordings as it was of popular music and jazz. Schaeffner was the director and founder of the ethnomusicology department of the Trocadéro Museum (later the Musée de L’Hommes and a popular haunt of Picasso, Derain, Matisse and other artists) and he made a number of field recordings in French West Africa.132 The rhythms of work in the cotton plantations of America and the music that developed there, along with the increased mechanization of modern work (especially in the guise of Taylorism) are pulled together into a conflation that registers both as ‘primitive’.133 In his later study, simply entitled Jazz but subtitled ‘from the Congo to the metropolitan’, Goffin takes up the story to explain the circumstances of jazz’s emergence in Europe: at the beginning of the twentieth century, music experienced an evolution which was common to all the arts. This fact must be fully grasped from the very start, as it is essential for the comprehension of the true importance of the present significance of syncopated music. At the beginning of the present century there was a sort of qualitative change in artistic feeling. Up to that time the canons of beauty were based on clear, logical, and reasonable concepts which were under the control of the intelligence. A whole sphere of human activity, the subconscious, has been ignored.134

Orphism and a New Tune I

85

He goes on to propose that this area of the subconscious is not only true of surrealism but also, in the visual arts, of ‘Rousseau, the customs inspector, who like jazz musicians created things of beauty without knowing just how’. Again, we see the familiar assumption that improvisation, and the roots of black American culture spring more from magic than they do from knowledge, a persistent and convenient myth. I am not going to labour the point (although I shall draw on it later), but simply point the reader in the direction of a book that has most fully exposed the mythic status of this trope: Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz, a ‘book [that] tells the story of the remarkableness of the training and rigorous musical thinking that underlie improvisation’.135 Goffin’s book goes on to explain that the key characteristic of black music, and hence of jazz, is rhythm. His argument is that the African roots of jazz, through enforced slavery, allowed only a memory, an interior possession of African music, to remain. This memory was mixed with French and American music (the latter is not defined) and folklore, and it is this mix that produced jazz. However, the rhythm of such music is both potent and dangerous, absorption in such rhythm causes an intoxication which can produce a surreal, hallucinatory, non-rational state: ‘Negroes dancing and singing to the eternal, monotonous rhythm of the drum. At the first drumbeat the dancers are literally entranced – out of the world. Reason and sensibility no longer restrict their actions. It is a scene of religious ecstasy – the mythical enchantment of pure rhythm . . . men and women . . . twisting their bodies with a continuous movement.’136 This phenomenological absorption of rhythm and its consequent arabesque destabilization of the body we have seen before. The by-passing of reason and the mind, through a seeming direct admission to the body, allows rhythm to access a religious or mythical realm, often in the guise of Shamanism. That state of ‘belief ’ (not knowledge), of spirituality, of non-rational, heightened experience – these are all conditions that Kupka would have recognized and appreciated. He expressed the view that the world was composed of rhythms of synaesthetic energy: I have discovered for myself the sensation of splendid sensitivity to colour, aroused exclusively by hygienic care. After my morning shower, I exercise, summer and winter, entirely naked in the garden . . . my entire body penetrated by the fragrances and the rays of light. Thus I experience magnificent moments, bathed in hues flowing from the titanic keyboard [chromatic piano] of colour . . . The different colours in the human skin are due in part to carbon assimilated by the metabolism, and in part to the effects of the thermal rays of vital energy which, adjusting to the intensity of ambient light, regulates its dosage so as to best maintain the existence of the organism.137

This typical mixture of science and spiritualism allows for a form of synaesthetic penetration, which together with other aspects of his life, his vegetarianism, his sun worship and interest in theosophy, prepared him, he believed, directly to contact universal forces, the rhythms of life, that emanated from the sun via the ‘keyboard of colour’ (a reference akin to Kandinsky’s in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, quoted above). There is also a level at which this is related to Bergson’s ‘vital energy’. Elan vital was the product of free will and intuition and in this way Kupka regarded artists whose

86

Improvision

art was ‘fixed in advanced’, tied too closely to tradition or convention, as ‘false’ artists. ‘True’ artists, on the other hand, are those in tune with their intuition, artists who improvise.138 Kupka sought a synthetic intelligence, an intuitive intelligence; one that allows a creative decision to speak to the present, to act as a form of recollection in concert with present circumstances and future projections, fruitfully interacting to ‘flow’ naturally, bypassing reason. This is a process that should remind us of improvisation in jazz, not the presumed ‘mythic channelling’ of Goffin, but an openended operation of real time composition based on a concord of elements: mastery of the instrument, theoretical analysis, historical consciousness and imaginative exploration; memory, anticipation, listening, and not least, the creative exploitation of ‘mistakes’.139 All these elements are involved in creative improvisation. Through this the good jazz performer establishes a ‘personal expression’ grounded in intuitive intelligence and tacit knowledge. Kupka’s exposure to this idea may well have come via Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’, which is likewise dependent on intuition, according to Richard Lehan: Intuitive intelligence is thus the highest form of cognitive power as well as the force which drives man ahead of it. When the weight of this force carries the totality of the past to the moment, we have memory – and the creation of both the universe and the self in Bergson is inseparable from the functioning of intuition and memory. Thus, for Bergson, mind both directs and accesses life. With this idea he undid the notions of mechanism and teleology, undercut both Enlightenment and Darwinian assumptions, gave weight to the modernist belief that art is the highest function of our activity, and helped establish the modernist belief that the universe is inseparable from mind and that the self is created out of memory.140

Goffin’s book concludes with the deduction that improvisation is fundamental to the identity of jazz as music, and that this also has political ramifications, and thus sets up a common trope; that jazz represents a ‘music of freedom’. ‘It is significant that the victory of 1918 brought jazz as well as peace to Europe, where its qualities were recognized and established . . . it is the music of freedom, freedom of individuals and of races. It is the great art of democracy, irreconcilable with the philosophy of the dictators.’141 It should be remembered that this assessment was written in the last years of the Second World War, but like his earlier book, Aux Frontières du Jazz, it provides an indicative picture of an ideology that accompanied the sights and sounds of jazz in the first decades of the century, especially in Europe. Another important issue raised in Goffin’s book is the role of jazz recordings. He was writing a few years before the LP was introduced (which was around 1948), but in the early years of the century, when Kupka and Picabia were encountering jazz, a 10-inch, 78rpm disk restricted the amount of music that could be captured to about three-and-a-half minutes playing time. This restricted both the length of performance and the place and role of improvisation within jazz recordings. In live performance, improvisations might last up to 30 minutes and involve complex, inter-performer musical interactions. The difficulty of recording certain instruments also challenges our record of how early jazz sounded: pianos were often substituted by banjos (as

Orphism and a New Tune I

87

mentioned in the previous chapter, pianists made piano rolls instead, although these too had limitations, as we saw), drums were also difficult to record, especially the snare and bass drum. Eddie Edwards, for example reported, ‘you couldn’t use a bass drum, which vibrated too much, or a snare drum, which came out blurred’. As the trombonist of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (the earliest recorded jazz outfit in 1917), he went on to explain that their drummer, Tony Sbarbaro, ‘had to beat only on cow bells, wood blocks, and sides of drums’.142 What recordings did allow, despite this compression and distortion of the jazz event, was a much greater dissemination of the music and, importantly, its repeatability. This allowed remote dissemination, learning and practice, which in turn changed the nature of improvisation, providing an international oral tradition. These details aside, Kupka had a deep interest in science and modern technology, and while this has been noted before in relation to photography, film and chronophotography, the impact of developments in recording technology were bound to have resonance for an artist for whom music acted as such a potent metaphor of abstraction: as even Vachtová puts it, ‘To Kupka music was total abstraction.’143 This is in a way just another example of movement arrested. Recordings provided (to use a visual metaphor) a mirror; they allowed reflection on moments of time. In this way records and the gramophone were analogues for many of Kupka’s paintings themselves. Jazz was a music born into a recording world, its first recordings coincided with the end of the First World War and its birth and development have been charted, preserved, modulated and mediated through records. One of the key debates which Goffin’s book took part in was that around the relationship between ‘straight’ jazz and ‘hot’ jazz; commodified form and ‘authentic’ form. The distinction originally came from the critic Hugues Panassié, who wrote a series of articles in the early 1930s where he characterized ‘white jazz’ (Paul Whiteman, Ted Lewis, etc.) as ‘straight’ jazz, and ‘hot’ jazz was associated with African-American musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and a very few select white Americans like Bix Beiderbecke. The difference between jazz as it might have been identified in the early decades of the century in Europe, and in the 1930s, was that a wider range of musics were now capable of admission under its head. This was in great part a consequence of the dissemination of jazz through records (French, German, English and increasingly American) and the greater number of touring performers from America who came to Europe. For Goffin the key difference between these two forms, as mentioned above, was the role of improvisation. In his earlier book Aux Frontières du Jazz, he makes similar points to those of his later book, that jazz in its spontaneous, improvised guise, represents a struggle for freedom, although, as also suggested above, this notion rests, ironically, on the primitivist assumption of an unschooled, unconscious aesthetic instinct. This seeking of jazz as an analogue for both a primitive, ur-aesthetic and as a modern, machine aesthetic, is helpfully summed up by Hal Foster in a more general context: the primitivist avant-garde was politically ambiguous at best, and at the very least it helped to manage conflicts and resistances provoked by the imperial dynamic of capitalist modernity. Yet this avant-garde was also ambivalently critical: its partial

88

Improvision identification with the primitive, however imaged problematically as dark, feminine, and perverse, remained a partial disassociation from white, patriarchal, bourgeois society, and this disassociation should not be dismissed as insignificant.144

This is also part of a moment in modernism that sought to re-engage the ‘musical’ in an attempt to seek out the primary, or fundamental, roots of visual mark-making. Jazz is appropriate in this regard because of its alternative aesthetic priorities to classical music and its identity as a complex popular cultural icon founded on the gestures of spontaneity and improvisation grounded in instinct. But as music it was also immaterial, and abstract, affecting of the body through its powerful formal rhythm. While Kupka may have identified with Bach, he also painted against a background of emergent jazz. This, of course, was no less true of his fellow Orphists, Picabia and Duchamp, and the roots of these ideas manifested themselves in American artists too, like Arthur Dove. But it is specifically to Picabia, and other European artists in direct contact with American jazz, that we now turn.

Notes 1 2

La Création dans les arts plastiques (see note 5 below). M. Antliff and P. Leighten, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 486. 3 For a fine performance of this work I recommend the jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis’s recording with the (in this context aptly named) Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Sony Classical, ASIN: B00ER7R9CY). 4 The exception here is A. Hicken, see Apollinaire, Cubism and Orphism (Ashgate, 2002). 5 M. Rowell in Frantisek Kupka, 1871–1957: A Retrospective, suggests a lost version was translated into Czech and published in Prague in 1923, then translated back into French in 1989. Flinker in the French edition of the text asserts the text was written 1911–13 in French and then translated into Czech and published for the first time in 1923. Wünsche in Frantisek Kupka: Creation in Nature and Art, argues that it was written earlier between 1907 and 1913 on the basis of correspondence between Kupka and Rössler (Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Vienna). Cercle d’Art published the work in paperback in 1989 (source of quote), p. 302. 6 Kupka, interview in Svetozor, 1 September 1936, p. 19 (after M. Mladek, ‘Central European Influences’ in Frantisek Kupka 1871–1957, A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975), p. 31. 7 See D. Kosinski (ed.), Painting the Universe: Frantisek Kupka Pioneer in Abstraction (Dallas Museum of Art, 1997) pp. 94–5. Also R. H. Abraham, Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History (San Francisco: Harper, 1994). 8 See Michael Minden, ‘Urworte. Orphisch’, German Life and Letters, vol. 36, no. 1–2 (1982–3); Erika Swales, ‘Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “Urworte. Orphisch”’ in Landmarks in German Poetry, ed. Peter Hutchinson (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 57–71. 9 See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002), esp. ch. 4. 10 See M. Rowell, ‘Le prométhée de Kupka’ in Frantisek Kupka 1871–1957 ou l’invention d’une abstraction (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1990).

Orphism and a New Tune I

89

11 L. Dhuys, intro. to Aeschylus’ Prometheus (Paris: Librairie Blaizot, 1924), pp. xx–xxi. See also M. Rowell, ‘Frantisek Kupka: Prometheus’ in The Print Collectors Newsletter, vol. VI, no. 4, Sept.–Oct. 1975, pp. 129–32. 12 See also C. Corbeau-Parsons, Prometheus in the Nineteenth Century: From Myth to Symbol (London: Legenda, 2013), p. 173. 13 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans and ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 51. 14 See F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). 15 Quoted after D. Kosinski (ed.), Painting the Universe: Frantisek Kupka Pioneer in Abstraction (Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), p. 100. 16 I shall say more about the Orphic myth in the next chapter. 17 The exploration of African and African-American music and dance has been thoroughly explored in relation to primitivism and emerging modern art by Jody Blake in her excellent Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (Penn State University Press, 1999). I direct the reader to this for detailed empirical material. 18 This is why I also tend to use the word ‘musics’ rather than the less differentiated ‘music’. 19 C. Bell, ‘Plus De Jazz’ in Since Cézanne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), p. 215. 20 For more on this see K. H. Pinson’s excellent Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard’s Photography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 21 D. K. L. Chua, ‘On Invisibility’ in Absolute Music: And the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 191. 22 He exhibited ‘Autumn Sun (Three Goddesses)’ (oil on canvas, 103 x 117 cm, Prague, National Gallery, 1905–6). 23 In the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 24 See J. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (State University Press of New York, 2003). 25 Aspects of the following argument are developed from Phillip Harper’s recent discussion of abstraction and black culture in P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York University Press, 2015). 26 In the PBS documentary the ‘History of Jazz’ (broadcast in the US in January 2001). Quoted after P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics, p. 71. 27 My book Eye hEar The Visual in Music (Routledge, 2016) is a critique of the idea of music as just sound. 28 G. Schuller, The History of Jazz: Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development, vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 80. 29 Quoted after P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics, p. 71. 30 Recall Ansermet’s discussion of ‘extended musical instrumental techniques’, or, as he put it in relation to the whole ensemble in his essay on Will Marion Cook and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, ‘a strange, fused, total sonority distinctly its own’. E. Ansermet, ‘Sur un Orchestre Nègre’, Revue Romande, October 1919 (trans W. W. Schaap), reprinted in R. Walser (ed.), Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 9–11). 31 R. Erikson, Sound Structure in Music (University Press of California, 1975), p. 72. 32 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. II, trans E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publication, 1958, originally published in German, 1883), p. 406. 33 J. Dapogny, entry ‘Louis Armstrong’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, vol. 2, ed. S. Sadie (London and New York: Macmillan, 2001),

90

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48

49 50

51 52

Improvision pp. 30–32. This can be musically charted through the course of the ‘Hot Fives’ 33 recordings from November 1925 to December 1927. G. Schuller, The History of Jazz: Early Jazz, p. 89. See ibid, p. 91. Ibid, pp. 91–2. J. Dapogny, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 2 (2001), p. 31. P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics (New York University Press, 2015), p. 77. Ibid. A. Appel, Jr., Jazz Modernism: from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (Yale University Press, 2002). P. Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, intro. and trans. S. Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger Pub., reprint 1971), p. 17. P. Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918 (Cologne: Verlang M. DuMont Schauberg, 1957), p. 242. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Creative Independent Pub. Platform, 2010), section II, ‘Linear Perspective’ (47–48) ‘Of the line’. See L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (revised edn, MIT Press, 2013). Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 75. ‘The Appeal of the Primitive Jazz’ in Literary Digest, 25 August 1917. (See Jazz in Print (1856–1920): An Anthology of Selected Early Readings in Jazz History, ed. K. Koenig (Pendragon Press, 2002), p. 116. St Vitus Dance, also known as ‘choreomania’, is not well understood. See A. Davidson, ‘Choreomania: An Historical Sketch with some account of an epidemic observed in Madagascar’ (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, reprinted from the Edinburgh Medical Journal, August 1867). Also, R. Caterina and L. Bunt (2002) ‘Music and disease’ in Enciclopedia della musica: Il sapere musicale II , ed. J.-J. Nattiez (Turin, Italy: Guilio Einaudi, (2002). E. Ansermet, ‘Sur un Orchestre Nègre’, Revue Romande, October 1919 (trans W. W. Schaap), reprinted in R. Walser (ed.), Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 9–11. As Anne Shaw Faulkner put it in her marvellously entitled article ‘Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?’ for the August issue of the Ladies Home Journal in 1921: ‘In ragtime the rhythm is thrown out of joint . . . in jazz exactly the same thing is done to the harmony . . . Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.’ See K. Koening (ed.), Jazz in Print (1859–1929) (Pendragon Press, 2002), p. 153. Jacques Villon, Le cake-walk des petites filles, 1904 (aquatint, drypoint, and roulette printed in colour ink on wove paper, 30.5 × 42 cm). Claude-Emma was born in 1905 and sometimes known as ‘Chou-chou’ (she died of complications following diphtheria, having been misprescribed treatment, the year after her father in 1919). The ragtime elements of this movement are wonderfully juxtaposed to references to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The dedication in the score reads: A ma chère petite Chouchou, avec les tendres excuses de son Père pour ce qui va suivre. C. D. (To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows. C.D.). Henri Matisse. Le Bonheur de vivre, also called ‘The Joy of Life’, between October 1905 and March 1906. Oil on canvas. Overall: 69 1/2 × 94 3/4 in. (176.5 × 240.7 cm). BF719. Henri Matisse, Dance, between 1909 and 1910, oil on canvas (260 × 391 cm). Entered the Hermitage in 1948; handed over from the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; originally in the Sergei Shchukin collection. ГЭ –9673.

Orphism and a New Tune I

91

53 See especially L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (revised edn MIT Press, 2013). 54 Quoted after L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 217. 55 See M. Rowell, ‘Kupka, Duchamp and Marley’, Studio International, CLXXXIX (Jan.–Feb. 1975), pp. 48–51. Also, L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 221. 56 Kupka, ‘le chant rythmique de I’esprit’. La Création dans les arts plastiques (preface Philippe Dagen, Paris: Editions Cercle d’art, 1989), p. 56. 57 Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours, 1912, oil on canvas, 211 × 220 cm, National Gallery Prague, Trade Fair Palace. O 5942. 58 It was exhibited in the so-called Cubist room no. 11 in October. In addition to Amorpha on a musical theme, there were two other musical/dance works in the same room: Picabia’s Dances at the Spring II (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Metzinger’s Dancer in a Café (Albright-Knox Gallery Buffalo). Also in the same room were Picabia’s The Spring (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Léger’s Woman in Blue (Kunstmuseum, Basel), Fauconnier’s Mountaineers Attacked by Bears (Rhode Island School of Design) and sculptures by Modigliani and Nadelman. 59 This is clearly evident in the differences between the late studies and the final image. 60 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques (Paris: Editions Cercle d’art, 1989), pp. 166–7. 61 Ibid, p. 168. 62 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 10, trans R. Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 235. 63 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 156. 64 As one of the anonymous readers of this book pointed out (for which many thanks!), there is an additional pun. ‘Piano à queue’ puns the ‘queue’ (tail) as slang for penis – a piano played by a woman for a man. 65 R. Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of my Books, first published 1935, trans with notes by T. Winkfield et al. (New York: Sun 1977), quotes pp. 8 and 11. 66 This phrase is reported in Schwarz, in conversation with Duchamp. (See A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 1970). 67 See Warshawsky, ‘Orphism, latest of the painting cults’, New York Times, 19 October 1913, p. 4. The article had the following subtitle ‘Paris school, led by Francois Kupka, holds that color affects senses like music’. 68 Quoted after A. Pierre, Frank Kupka in White and Black (facsimile reprints of ‘Abstractions’ (1933/1948) and ‘Four Stories of White and Black (1926) (Artists Bookworks, Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 42. 69 Solo of a Brown Line (70 × 115 cm, Prague: National Gallery); Insistent White Line (1913–23, 65 × 79 cm, National Gallery, Prague). See also the later gouache, Walk of a White Line (1919–21) reproduced in Two Pioneers of Modern Art1. From the Jan and Meda Mladek Collection> (Vienna: Albertina, 1996), p. 317. 70 L. Vachtová, Frank Kupka, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), pp. 177–8. 71 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 162. 72 Quoted after B. Harker, ‘ “Telling a Story”: Louis Armstrong and Coherence in Early Jazz’ in Current Musicology, no. 67 (Fall 1997), pp 46–83. 73 For more detailed examples see B. Harker, ‘Telling a Story’ op. cit. 74 Spurrier described his and Bix Beiderbecke’s respect for Armstrong’s improvising, and the development of what they referred to as ‘correlated chorus’, by which they meant: ‘Louis departed greatly from all cornet players in his ability to compose a close-knit individual 32 measures with all phrases compatible with each other, so Bix and I always credited Louis as being the father of the correlated chorus: play two measures, then two

92

Improvision

related, making four measures, on which you played another four measures related to the first four, and so on ad infinitum to the end of the chorus. So the secret was simple – a series of related phrases.’ See R. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans with William Dean-Myatt, Bix: Man and Legend (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974), pp. 100–1. 75 B. Harker, ‘Telling a Story’, p. 76. 76 H. Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 32. 77 Ibid, p. 21. 78 Ibid, p. 32. 79 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 198. 80 Le Trait Obsédant (1913–23), Prague: National Gallery. 81 B. Harker, ‘Telling a Story’, p. 49. 82 Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (1872–73, 70 × 51 cm, Tate, London). 83 ‘Mr Whistler’s Cheyne Walk’, The Word (22 May 1878) in Ten O’Clock: A Lecture by James A. McNeill Whistler (Portland Maine: Thomas Bird Mosher, 1916), p. 34. 84 See Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 258. 85 This argument is indebted to Peter Dyan’s book, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 86 For more on ‘cultural synaesthesia’ see S. Shaw-Miller, ‘Synaesthesia’ chapter 2 of The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. T. Shephard and A. Leonard (Routledge, 2013). 87 The retrospective exhibition was at the Gallerie SVU Mánes, Prague, Nov.–Dec. 1946. L. Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 283. 88 See P. Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in AvantGuerre Paris (Chicago University Press, 2013), pp. 66–8. 89 She was also painted by Toulouse-Lautrec. In a poster ‘Moulin Rouge: La Goulue’ (1891) and La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1892). 90 See for example, P. Simons, ‘Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism in Art History, ed. N. Broude and M. D. Garrard (New York: Icon, 1992), pp. 39–57. 91 See Leighten, The Liberation of Painting, especially chapter 5. 92 See P. Meissner, J. Toman, A. Pachovska and L. Vachtova, Kupka – Waldes: The Artist and His Collector (Divus/Meiddner, 2014). Waldes was an industrialist and founder of the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company specializing in buttons and fasteners. 93 This influence came through Kupka’s involvement with the Abstraction-Création group. 94 M. Rowell, in Frantisek Kupka 1871–1957 A Retrospective (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975), p. 295. 95 From Kupka’s notes, after V. Spate, Orphism: The evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 77. 96 Kupka manuscript I p. 9 and p. 26 (quoted after Frantisek Kupka 1871–1957 A Retrospective, p. 289. 97 See Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 311. 98 Frantisek Kukpa la collection du Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (Paris, 2003), p. 160. 99 Letter from Kupka to his patron Jindrich Waldes, quoted after catalogue, www. museothyssen.orgen/collection/artists/kupka-frantisek/machine-drill (2018). 100 A. Jeanneret, ‘Le Négre et le jazz’ in Le Revue musicale, 8 (1 July 1927), pp. 24–7. 101 Quoted after M. Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 225.

Orphism and a New Tune I

93

102 Kupka manuscript of text ‘Credo sous un arbre jamais taillé’ (1913), quoted after D. Kosinski (ed.), Painting the Universe: Frantisek Kupka Pioneer in Abstraction (Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), p. 160. 103 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 69. 104 National Gallery, Prague 85 × 140). 105 See the list of works in Vachtová, Frank Kupka, pp. 291–317. 106 Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, cat. 120, 85 × 137 cm. 107 See figs 110–112b in Frantisek Kukpa la collection du Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (Paris, 2003). 108 See Vachtová, Frank Kupka, catalogue nos. Cakes (287), Machine comique (280), Synthèse (291). 109 Paul Colin (1892-1985), a graphic designer made famous by his posters for La Revue Nègre. He was also a lover and friend of Josephine Baker. 110 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 197. 111 See Vachtová, Frank Kupka, figs. 122, 123a, 123b, 124. 112 This study is called Study for Smile 0 in Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 317 (no. 119). 113 V. Spate, Orphism: The evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 133. 114 P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 16. 115 Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907, trans A. Mitchell, 1911, New York: Henry Holt), p. 6. 116 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, p. 45. 117 Ibid, p. 132. 118 Ibid. p. 93. 119 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York, George Wittenborn, 1966, original German edn 1912), p. 45. 120 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 258. 121 Ibid, p. 258. 122 Words in quotation marks ref to Vachtová, Frank Kupka, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), cat. numbering: Amorpha and Fugue for Two Colours (1913, 139), Syncopated Glass of Beer (1930, 285), Solo of a Brown Line (1913, 232), Colour in Full Orchestration (1921, 171), Composition (1947, 151). 123 Kupka, quoted in Vachtová, Frank Kupka, p. 286. 124 A. Schaeffner (with A. Coeuroy), Le Jazz (first published 1926, reprint with preface by F. Ténot, Paris: éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1988). 125 This was supported by such studies as M. Delafosse’s L’Ame nègre (The Negro Soul) (1922) and Les Nègres (1927). 126 Atonality was coined as a term by Joseph Marx in 1907. 127 J. F. Lane, Jazz and Machine Age Imperialism (University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 41. 128 A. Gingrich, ‘Introduction’ to R. Goffin, Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (New York: Doubleday, 1944), quotation p. ix. 129 For more on this see O. Roueff in J. Jamin and P. Williams (eds), Jazz et anthropologie. L’Homme. Revue francaise d’anthropologies special issue no. 158/9 (April–Sept., 2001). 130 Lane, Jazz and Machine Age Imperialism, p. 43. 131 Ibid, p. 51. 132 See the Columbia Masterworks LPs (SL–205) ‘The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music’, compiled and ed. Alan Lomax, vol. II ‘African Music from the French Colonies’ ed. A. Schaeffner and G. Rouget (recordings from 1931 to 1950).

94

Improvision

133 Taylorism is named after the American industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) whose book Principles of Scientific Management (1911) established the fundamental principles of large-scale manufacturing through assembly-line factories. 134 R. Goffin, Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (New York: Doubleday, 1944), pp. 4–5. 135 Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, p. 15. 136 Goffin, Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan, p. 13. 137 Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques, pp. 136–7. 138 See footnote 79. 139 As Herbie Hancock has recalled in relation to a performance of ‘So What’, as part of the Miles Davis quintet: right in the middle of Miles’s solo, when he was playing one of his amazing solos, I played the wrong chord. A chord that just sounded completely wrong. It sounded like a big mistake. I said, ‘God’ and put my hands around my ears like this. Miles paused for a second and then he played some notes that made my chord right. He made it correct which astounded me. I couldn’t believe what I heard. Miles was able to make something that was wrong into something that was right with the power of his choice of notes that he made and that feeling that he had. So I couldn’t play for about a minute, I couldn’t even touch the piano. What I realize now is that Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened, just an event and so that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment. He dealt with it. He found something that, since he didn’t hear it as a mistake, he felt it was his responsibility to find something that fit. He was able to do that. He went on to relate the experience to life not just music: We can look for the world to be as [we] would like it to be. But the important thing is that we grow. And the only way we can grow is to have a mind that is open enough to experience situations as they are and turn them into medicine . . . Take whatever situation you have and make something constructive with it. That is what I learned in that situation from Miles.

140

141

142 143

144

See D. Cheadle (2015) Miles ahead [Video file]. Legacy Recordings. https:// www.facebook.com/LegacyRecordings/videos/10154013041127996/. R. Lehan, ‘Bergson and the Discourse of the Moderns’, in Burwick and Douglas (eds), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 311. Goffin, Jazz, p. 240. On this topic more recently see D. Fischlin, A. Heble and G. Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Duke University Press, 2013). Quoted after K. Ogren, Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), p. 94. And an artist who always had the radio playing music while he painted, according to some sources. See Two Pioneers of Modern Art1. From the Jan and Meda Mladek Collection (Vienna: Albertina, 1996), p. 378. H. Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004), p. 8.

3

Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image

Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that connects distant, seemingly different and hostile things. Only through vast analogies can an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphic, embrace the life of matter. Marinetti, Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (1912)

Part 1 The early twentieth century was a time of a naive certainty in uncovering primary, ancient, or, as discussed in the last chapter, ‘primitive’ characteristics of artistic expression. In many ways Kupka was seeking an equivalent to linguistic philosopher Walter Ong’s ‘primary orality’1, but in Kupka’s case it was a primary visuality. Ong proposed the view that, among peoples who do not have a written language (and this should remind us of Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 1), there is no conception of words existing separately from their sound. Ong argues that theorists like Ferdinand de Saussure fail to recognize that their view of language is based in the ‘sight’ or image of words and their meaning, but for primary oral cultures words are simply sounds, not things conveyed by sounds. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back – ‘recall’ them. But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events.2

Music and speech are sound, primarily. This also points out the difference between music understood primarily as the following of text, written down and codified by the composer, as in so called ‘classical music’ (what we often refer to as the ‘reading’ of music) and its ‘opposite’, music understood as sound, gestures passed from performer to performer not via a composer, and therefore not written, but improvised in the moment, as in jazz. Ironically, the idea of ‘absolute’ music is predicated on the idea of sound alone, even as the concept itself becomes dependent on the ‘sight’ of the written score and the 95

96

Improvision

visual gestures of the conductor. In addition, this concept of ‘absolute music’ aspired to strip music of its contact with the other arts (and senses), its sisterly relations. Music was, in theory, purified of word and the visual.3 This purist aspiration also coincided with modernism and became paradigmatic. Of course, such purist ambition fails because the ‘purity’ of sound is replaced by the ‘invasion’ of the visual, the score becomes the graphic centre of absolute music; music swirls around the vortex of the manuscript, which is the source of authorial intent. Musics that sit outside this ambition (popular and folk musics for example) are in some ways more akin to Ong’s ‘primary oral’ cultures, where there is no written sign or score, just sound and gesture – ironically sound, qua sound, therefore, becomes more primary in these hybrid musics. That is not to argue, however, that such musics ‘sound alone’ as absolute music aspired to do. It should be recognized that the visual in this case is merely encoded in a different way; rather than in the score, it becomes centred on the instrument, the performer and their body.4

Rhythm and proportion We might characterize this difference in other terms. To invoke technical differences, we might suggest that the more central position of harmony and harmonic modulation, what may be called the invisible ordering of sound, feature most prominently within the ideology of classical music. In contrast to this is the technical rôle, the central consideration of rhythm within the etiquettes of jazz, and this rhythm is played out in the pulse of the body. This is not to suppose that rhythm is necessarily more sophisticated in jazz, or that harmony is any less significant, it is just that, as a cultural discourse, it become more visible, as does timbre (or what is sometimes called a player’s ‘tone’). These elements are more explicit, not necessarily more sophisticated. In the early twentieth century, with ragtime, blues and jazz, the discourse around rhythm, syncopation and the more elusive element of ‘swing’, became not just a characteristic of discourses around music, but also other arts. To return to Metzinger’s statement, quoted in the previous chapter, and explore it further: Is there a work among the most modern in painting or in sculpture that does not, secretly, submit to the rhythm of the Greeks? Nothing, from the primitives to Cézanne, has been able to break away definitively from the chain of variations that connects us to the hellenic theme. These days I see yesterday’s rebels prostrating themselves unthinkingly in front of the bas-relief in Eleusis. Goths, Romantics, Impressionists, the old measure has triumphed over your admirable departures from rhythm [arythmés]; but your labour was not in vain. It has established in us the presence of another rhythm. The Greeks invented the human form for us. It is up to us to invent it again for others. This is not a matter of a ‘partial’ movement that has to do with known liberties, liberties of interpretation, of transposition etc. These are half measures! What we need is a total emancipation.5

Orphism and a New Tune II

97

The secret rhythm of the Greeks is a classical rhythm of proportion, but what is needed instead, it is proposed, is a new primitive pulse: ‘your admirable departures from rhythm’. Syncopation is exactly this, a departure from the beat, and swing, the ‘feel’ of syncopation, is the slight anticipation or delay after the beat. Syncope affects the short-term proportion but rarely the overall temporal arc. A correspondent of Edgar Allan Poe provided a helpful summary, describing the non-notated rhythms in ‘clapping Juba’ by African-Americans (Juba is probably a ‘jig’): ‘There is no attempt to keep to all the notes, but then it comes so pat & so distinct that the cadence is never lost . . . Such irregularities are like rests and grace notes. They must be so managed as neither to hasten or retard the beat. The time of the bar must be the same, no matter how many notes are in it.’6 Such rhythmic sophistication is manifest in performance, not notation; it is felt rather than written, existing in the body rather than the text. The visual analogue for this is also temporal, and principally manifest in this period in cubist theory, in relation to discussions of proportion. Here it is most often linked to deformation according to the fourth dimension. As Apollinaire puts it, the fourth dimension ‘gives objects the right proportions on the whole, whereas in Greek art, for instance, a somewhat mechanical rhythm constantly destroys the proportions’.7 Understandings of early jazz and ragtime often conflate, or misunderstand, the relationship between ‘swing’ and the mechanical, in that jazz (and popular music more generally) was often seen as mechanical (Adorno), a perception which misconceives the rhythmic play that is inherent in swing as the human and improvised contradiction to the ‘mechanical’ beat. This is largely a consequence of the relationship of pulse and metre to rhythm. While pulse is stated, it is the pull and push against and within it that marks out swing. It is the ghost in the machine. Apollinaire, like Metzinger, argues against conventional laws of proportion and division. He associates distortion and this new sense of proportion with truth, and a concept of new beauty that is heavily dependent on Nietzsche. He specifically cites the German philosopher in his Les Peintres Cubistes: Nietzsche divined the possibility of such an art: ‘O divine Dionysius, why pull my ears?’ Ariadne asks her philosophical lover in one of the celebrated dialogues on the Isle of Naxos. I find something pleasant and delightful in your ears, Ariadne; why are they not even longer? Nietzsche, in relating this anecdote, puts in the mouth of Dionysius an implied condemnation of all Greek art.8

Nietzsche is here referring to the concept of beauty as a human construct (which he does in the third person), ‘the vanity of their species’, and goes on ‘they [humans] consider anything beautiful if it casts their image back at them . . . For a little suspicion may whisper into the skeptic’s ear: is the world really beautified by the mere fact that human beings take it to be beautiful? They’ve humanized it: that’s all.’9 Man mirrors himself in things and Apollinaire sees cubism as an antidote to this, an art that is less human-centred, ‘The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as the ideal, and it is to that we are indebted for a new measure of perfection, which allows the painter to give the object proportions consistent with the degree of plasticity to which he wishes to bring it.’10 Apollinaire takes Nietzsche’s criticism of beauty as Apollonian, an

98

Improvision

attribute of distinct object rather than of a Dionysian flux of forces – forces that are more apparent in the musical arts than the visual ones, which, until cubism, had been too fixed on ‘distinct’ objects. The evocation of Dionysius here chimes with the apparent ‘abandon’ of the cakewalk and ragtime. Both offered a different rhythm to that of control and proportion, Dionysius is that god in the heart of Greek measure who adds a touch of madness, ecstasy, who is both drunken incapacity and elevated consciousness. In addition, LeRoy Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier cite deformation in African sculpture and arte nègre as key forces in shaping Apollinaire’s understanding of the fourth dimension in Les Peintres Cubistes.11 Both fourth-dimensional vision, according to Apollinaire, that is perception beyond the limits of the senses through conceptualization, and African art are seen as promoting an approach to reality above pure perception – ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them’, is how Picasso expressed it.12 Thus, both contemporary ideas and African art are linked to nonEuclidean geometry. In addition, contemporary African-American culture amplifies the relevance of moving to a different rhythm, the fulfilment of Metzinger’s hope for ‘a total emancipation’. Of all the elements of music, rhythm is the most obvious in relation to deformations in the relationship of time, through rhythm’s play with pulse (or beat) in syncopation.

Dionysian jazz13 While far from a discussion of jazz, Nietzsche’s interest in music in The Birth of Tragedy is focused on the Dionysian element as the dissonant. Dissonance exists not just as an interruption in harmony but also as a skip in the step of rhythm. It is accordingly the dissonant element of art that lies beyond the Apollonian: ‘The joy that the tragic myth excites has the same origin as the joyful sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is the common source of music and tragic myth.’14 Apollo represents the world of appearance and harmony, the Dionysiac is the eternal, the intuitive, the rhythmic and the primordial that exists below the surface; and, like the early twentieth-century perception of African art, it shows a truth that the cultivated Apollonian cannot show: Here the Dionysiac, as against the Apolline, proves to be the eternal and original artistic force, calling the whole phenomenal world into existence: in the midst of it a new transfigurating illusion is required if the animated world of individuations is to be kept alive. If we could imagine dissonance becoming man – and what else is man? – then in order to stay alive that dissonance would need a wonderful illusion, covering its own being with a veil of beauty.15

It is this Dionysian element that will bring about a transfiguration of art, to revivify the Apollonian in touch with intuition and improvisation and reflecting what Apollinaire called ‘the infinite universe as the ideal’: ‘Where the Dionysian powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of

Orphism and a New Tune II

99

beauty’.16 Like Rousseau before him, as we saw in the Introduction, Nietzsche placed melody as fundamental: ‘Melody, then, is both primary and universal . . . Melody gives birth to poetry’ and within folk song we find lexus imitating melos. ‘In the poetry of folk song, then, we see language doing its utmost to imitate music’, and this conception brings word, tone and picture together: ‘Thus we have described the only possible relationship between poetry and music, word and sound: now imbued with music’s power, the word, the image and the concept seek an expression analogous to music’.17 Apollinaire develops this point in relation to the new art in his Les Peintres Cubistes: We are thus heading towards an entirely new art, which will be to painting as it has been conceived until now what music is to literature. It will be pure painting, just as music is pure literature. The music lover, in hearing a concert, experiences a joy of a different order than the joy he experiences while listening to natural noises like the babbling of a brook, the crash of a torrent, the whistling of the wind through the forest, or the harmonies of human language, founded on reason and not on aesthetics.18

So far this is not an unfamiliar argument, founded on the same German romantic assumptions as the absolute music paradigm, but he then states; ‘Similarly, the new painters will procure from their admirers artistic sensations due solely to the harmony of asymmetrical lights.’19 He illustrates this with the famous anecdote of Apelles and Protogenes from Pliny about the one-upmanship of the painting of a single stroke. We might recall Kupka’s painting Solo of a Brown Line (or ‘stroke’) of 1912 as a work related to this tale, as he differentiates a ‘line’ (la ligne) from a ‘stroke’ (le trait), arguing that a stroke forms an ideogram, a line acts to divide space (his painting effectively illustrates both these states).20 It is significant that Apollinaire highlights the idea of asymmetry here precisely because the fourth dimension allows a ‘new way of measuring’. He goes on, ‘Nietzsche . . . gives an indictment of Greek art through Dionysius’s words. Let us add that this imagination, the fourth dimension, was only the manifestation of the aspirations, the restlessness, of a large number of young artists looking at Egyptian, African, and Oceanic sculptures’21 Asymmetry is analogous to the new beauty and truth of an art that looks outside the Western tradition, and this manifested itself in the asymmetry of syncopation, ragtime, new dances and jazz, as much as it did in African sculpture. The aesthetic model here, of a new ‘measure’, a measure of in-sight, comes from the ‘inner impulses’ of a black cultural expression. The idea of ‘inner impulses’ should not, however, be thought of as simply autonomous from ‘outer’ reality. Inner life is not free floating but connected to and generated by social life. Further, it is important that this art reaches people, as it had done successfully in popular music. For the visual arts this was more of a challenge, but Apollinaire sees Duchamp as the one artist who might yet achieve this. His art ‘which strives to aestheticize the musical perception of nature. Does not allow itself the caprice or inexpressive arabesque of music’, as it is preoccupied with energy and, he concludes, ‘Marcel Duchamp [may yet] reconcile art and the common people.’22 Undoubtedly, one of jazz’s greatest attractions to the avant-garde was that it was fun, exciting, modern, moving (physically, emotionally, sexually and imaginatively) and, importantly, popular.

100

Improvision

While Duchamp himself later decried this final sentence,23 it has resonance, I would suggest, with the future idea of the ready-made, particularly in the apparent manoeuvre of translation from the realm of the ‘everyday’ (the vernacular) to that of ‘art’ (the conceptual). Duchamp’s relationship with the older Apollinaire was not warm, but professional, although he did share a long and close friendship with another artist admired by Apollinaire, Francis Picabia. In his preceding entry in Les Peintres Cubistes, Apollinaire also compares Picabia’s art to music, as he had with Duchamp. Of Picabia he says: This art is as close to music as an art which is its opposite could be. It might be said of Picabia’s art that it would like to be to the old painting what music is to literature, but it cannot be said that it is music. In fact music proceeds by suggestion; here, conversely, the colors presented should no longer impress us as symbols, but as concrete forms.24

Like Duchamp, Picabia is seen to be concerned with extracting from nature ‘collective forms and colors’,25 but Picabia was drawn to the multifarious discussion then taking place about the analogy between painting and music. As Henry Valensi put it in 1913, ‘Then why not conceive of “pure painting”? Just as the musician has his notes, why not suppose that colour, by its intrinsic force, could express the thought of the painter?’26 In order to understand these issues more fully we need to consider the ideas circulating around those artists, like Duchamp and Picabia (and Valensi), who at this time were considered to be Orphic cubists.

Orphic cubism In Les Peintres Cubistes Apollinaire defines four tendencies that he believes have manifested themselves as sub-sets of cubism. ‘Scientific cubism’, a type of conceptual or geometrical cubism; artists he sees in this set are Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurençin and Juan Gris. ‘Physical cubism’ is in many ways the opposite of scientific cubism, in that it deploys elements borrowed from the visual world. Unlike the former ‘pure’ art he regards this as a ‘blended’ art; the principle artist associated with this is Henri Le Fauconnier. Then comes ‘Orphic cubism’. While this too is a ‘conceptual’ art form, it ‘must offer simultaneously a pure aesthetic pleasure, a construction obvious to the senses, and a sublime significance, namely, the subject. It is a pure art.’27 The artists he groups together here are Robert Delaunay, the most complete expression of this tendency, and those striving in this direction, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. The final category is ‘instinctive cubism’, which includes many artists and acts as a kind of ‘dustbin’ to sweep up all those who grope towards a type of Orphism through instinct, but lack belief and lucidity. As the title of the concept will suggest, the analogous relationship between art and music is particularly significant in relation to Orphism. However, the concept of music is not as unitary as many commentators tend to assume. While the concept of ‘pure’ music, that is ‘absolute’ music, might be most linguistically close to the idea of ‘pure’

Orphism and a New Tune II

101

orphic painting, the more modern (but simultaneously ‘primitive’ or basal), popular and rhythmic music of jazz has significant, although different parallels with Orphic ambition.

Orpheus/Orphism Significant within the mythology of Orpheus, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is his supposed ability to move all of nature, to move it in both the emotional and physical sense; his reclamation of his wife from the underworld; his death at the hands of Thracian women and the mysterious survival of his song after his death. There are many versions of the myth, prominent among them Ovid’s and Virgil’s, but the basic outlines are generally consistent: Orpheus accompanied Jason and the Argonauts, according to Apollonius Rhodius, and countered the dangerous allure of the Siren’s bewitching song by playing louder and more beautifully. He moved all of nature, changing the course of rivers and moving wild beasts, the trees and the inanimate rocks of nature: as Philostratus the Younger memorably has it, trees are moved and ‘stand about Orpheus with their branches joined like hands, and thus, without requiring the craft of man, they enclose for him a theatre, that therein the birds may sit on their branches and he may make music in the shade’.28 A site/sight made for his sound. The most famous element of his mythology is in the story of his love for Eurydice. According to both Ovid and Virgil, on their wedding day she was bitten by a snake and died. In grief and despair Orpheus descended to the underworld to retrieve his bride, and there moved all with his music and regained her, with the promise that he could not look upon her until they had left the underworld. He shares this descent into the underworld with Dionysius, whose mission was to bring his mother Semele back from the dead (and, according to some accounts, his wife Ariadne). But Orpheus’s pact was made through the medium of music. With only his lyre and his voice, Orpheus charmed both Cerberus and Hades, who, moved and enchanted, agreed to release Eurydice, but on condition that Orpheus refrain from looking at her until they had emerged from the underworld. This he failed to do, turning at the last moment before they emerged, only to see her retreat into the realm of the shades, forever to be separated. On his return to Thrace he too retreated, but into nature, sadly to serenade the beasts and trees, streams and plants. Later he was brutally set upon by Maenads, followers of Dionysus, who tore him to pieces, leaving his decapitated head, still singing, or reciting Eurydice’s name. It floated down the river Hebrus, drifting as far as Lesbos where the sound was finally silenced by Apollo.29 According to Aeschylus’s The Bassarids, it was Dionysus himself who sent his Maenads to destroy Orpheus, because he continued to worship Apollo and refused to honour him. Either way his death serves to emphasize the close links between Dionysus and Orpheus, and the power of music to survive even death. Music always carries a great power to move, but also a concomitant danger. It seems to have direct access to our own emotional underworld, and an ability to move the human spirit, which in the process bypasses the faculty of reason, or as Nietzsche has it, in Kathleen Higgins words:

102

Improvision

Music, however, could restore Dionysian awareness. Music not only reflects the fact that all our bodies respond to auditory sensation in essentially the same way; music also has the capacity to transmit a mode of awareness to its listeners. Specifically, it has the power to communicate the Dionysian sense that fundamentally existence – all that is entailed by “being alive” – is something that the listener can share with others . . . music [i]s the paradigmatic Dionysian art . . . Apollonian music, claims Nietzsche, is music only in the sense that it provides a wave-beat of rhythm, presumably in accompaniment to sung poetry. The tones of Apollonian music coincide with the crest of these waves of rhythm, with the result that the melody is not perceived as taking the form of a line with some independence from rhythm. Instead, a melodic line is only suggested by the tones that occur at regular distances and simultaneously with the rhythm.30

And taking up Schopenhauer’s argument that music directly objectifies the struggles of the will and that art alone can still the will and allow us to see beyond the phenomenal world to Platonic Ideas: Music, however, has the potential to affect the listener more powerfully than any other art is able to affect its beholder. This is so because the intended effect of any art is to release the observer from the grip of the illusory phenomenal world by making him aware of the reality behind it. But while other arts attempt to depict individual things and thus stimulate knowledge of the Platonic Ideas, music bypasses any possible reference to the phenomenal world and appeals to the will directly.31

Thus, music’s power as a paradigm for visual abstraction. Orpheus’s power is thus in giving priority to the emotional over the rational, the physical over the mental, the body over the mind (this was also Marsyas’s fate). As Mark Evan Bonds has put it, ‘The fear that the senses – the body – might overwhelm the intellect – the mind – lies at the heart of Western attitudes towards the arts in general but particularly towards music, which more than any other art exposes the division between the mind and the senses.’ He goes on, ‘The danger of being overpowered by music is as old [as] the tale of sirens: those seduced by the pleasure of sound are doomed, and fatally drawn away from duty and from the very necessities of survival.’32

Orphic jazz Music has at least two mythic streams. Some music attracts the Orphic, other music the Apollonian (remember it was Apollo who finally stopped the sound of Orpheus, and who elsewhere ‘triumphed’ over the flayed body of Marsyas). This can be clearly seen in early criticism of jazz, which is very much positioned as Orphic, Marsyan or Dionysian, especially in contrast to the purity of ‘classical music’. The Apollonian represents the Greek ideal of kalokagthia or ‘harmonious moderation’, which shares a rational, measurable system, capable of raising the listener up. As the critic Henry Fink put it in 1910, ‘one of the most important functions of music [is] that of weaning people from

Orphism and a New Tune II

103

low and demoralizing pleasure [and] savage impulses’.33 The Dionysian ability of jazz to bypass rationality was often liked (as previously mentioned) to a virus, or drunkenness (as would befit a follower of Dionysus). ‘A person inculcated with the ragtime fever is like one addicted to strong drink,’34 and as a New York doctor blankly declared, ‘jazz music causes drunkenness . . . producing thoughts and imaginations which overpower the will. Reason and reflection are lost and actions of persons are directed by the stronger animal passions.’35 The Cartesian mind/body split that patrolled the borders of the divide between classical and jazz music was clearly exemplified by a New York Times article of 1928. With music of the old style [classical music], even the most moving, the listener was seldom upset from his dignified posture . . . He might feel a tingling starting at his heels and lifting the roof of his head clear up to the ceiling . . . yet the bodily anchor remained intact. The listener behaved as impassively as the radio’s microphone. Nothing in his manner indicated either a struggle for self-control or an absence of decorum. The perturbation spent itself internally.36

As a French critic put it, ‘Jazz is . . . the music of the guts and of all those who carry their sensibilities between their legs.’37 The aspirational movement of classical music, from heel to head, left the body impassive, while jazz’s movement was more literal, it moved the body as it raised the passions. Orpheus was destroyed by such passions. This most skilled of all musicians did not trust his ears, he had to seek truth in a look, he had to see Eurydice, hearing her was not enough. Or he had to add sight to sound, to confirm what his ears heard. While classical music aspired (although always fails) to reach the condition of ‘sound alone’ (as I discussed in Eye hEar), jazz has always been happy to embrace the visual. As mentioned earlier, the dissemination of jazz (a music of improvisation, unfixed sound) was most effective via the technology of gramophone recording and radio (ways of fixing). The technological developments of the twentieth century can, and have been seen, to accelerate a shift from text-based to image-based instruments of representation. As Heidegger, among others, argued, the modern world is not just pictured differently from an earlier period, ‘rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age’.38 Industrialization, which in part gave birth to the dissemination and construction of popular music and the gramophone, is marked fundamentally by this visuality. The modern world is visualized ubiquitously in ways unimaginable to earlier epochs. Music, as I have argued elsewhere, is always visual, but the rhetoric of ‘absolute music’ is one that privileged the idea that musical meaning only resided in sound. What made jazz so troubling was that jazz’s musical meaning was, from its birth, embroiled with the visual, with the fact that it was first made by black people, that it was produced from different bodies and often on different instruments (banjos, saxophones, drum kits, etc.).39 The point is not that music is not sound, but that it is not just sound. Jazz’s embrace of the visual disrupts and challenges the idea that music was just disembodied sound and that the musical text could be fixed as score; in meaning, in intent and in an author. While music, in the wake of German romantic philosophy, might have challenged the idea that meaning

104

Improvision

only resides in the word,40 jazz (and popular music) added the emphatic presence of the visual. Further, the issue of meaning as it emerged from jazz was located in the performance event, rather than in the musical object (the score). The consequent emphasis on provisionality, rather than textual certainty, is significant, and one of the elements jazz seemed to promote was a sensual immediacy that escaped a more textbased assumption of meaning. Jazz is thus paradigmatic of a significant change in sensibilities. As one commentator, Dr F. Damrosch (Director of the Institute of Musical Art, later the Julliard School of Music – the site of this book’s final case study) rather disparagingly put it, We are living in a state of unrest, of social evolution, of transformation from a condition of established order to a new objective as yet dimly visualized. This is reflected in the jazz fad. We can only hope that sanity and the love of the beautiful will help to set the world right again, and that music will resume its proper mission of beautifying life instead of burlesqueing it. (my emphasis)41

It was precisely the visualization of this new world that the Orphists, among others, were trying to achieve, but they and other modernists had a much more positive spin on this period of change than that of the conservative critic quoted above. Many of them would have agreed with Taylor Atkins’s more recent words, ‘Jazz, in fact, represented nothing more profoundly than the coevalness of modern time: as they listened and danced to jazz, people imagined that they were experiencing modernity simultaneously with their counterparts in distant lands.’42 And it was this simultaneity that was so highly prized within the aesthetics of Orphism.

Sonia and Robert Delaunay Robert Delaunay was the central artist whose own interest in ‘simultanism’ modulated into Apollinaire’s Orphism.43 For Robert, the aspiration of his art was to render the modern, and the principle media and forms for that were light and rhythm. The influence of Sonia (usually Delaunay-Terk) on Robert was profound, but as with any close relationship, influence flowed in both directions, and the central aesthetic idea of ‘Simultanist consciousness’ is key to both their arts. This idea was stylistically fed by cubism and colour theory (especially the ideas of Michel Eugène Chevreuil), and it was applied to modern subjects such as architecture, the city, and later clothing and abstract design, all against a background of sonic simultaneity in the sounds of modernity, ragtime and jazz. In his development of this idea, Robert initially follows in Leonardo da Vinci’s footsteps by proclaiming art superior to music in the way simultaneity of light, entering our eyes (‘windows of the soul’) harmonizes. On the other hand, temporal art forms are dominated by a form of perceptivity that is shallow and successive: Auditory perception is not adequate for our knowledge of the universe; it has no depth . . . Its movement is successive, it is a sort of mechanism, its law is the time of

Orphism and a New Tune II

105

mechanical clocks which, like it, has no relationship with our perception of the visual movement of the Universe. It has the parity of geometrical things. Its nature brings it close to the geometrically conceived Object. The Object is not endowed with life, with movement. When it simulates movement it becomes successive, dynamic.44

Delaunay is translating Leonardo’s argument into a critique of music, and of visual art, which is based on objects which are ‘geometric, successive and mechanical’. He also takes up Bergson’s idea that the problem with analytic methods of describing the essence and energy of reality is that they miss its essential simultaneity. However, he fails fully to understand Bergson’s perception that music is simultaneous, and not simply successive. Bergson wrote on the comprehension of musical experience: ‘as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another’.45 Bergson regarded musical comprehension as a form of ‘mutual penetration’: to understand a musical gesture as a whole the memory pulls it together into one space, the space of comprehension.46 Simultaneity happens in all perception. The first time Robert used the idea of ‘simultaneity’ in the title of a painting was in his Berlin exhibition of 1913, where he titled one of his tripartite window paintings 2e Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 1re partie 3 motifs.47 As Virginia Spate has pointed out, this species of title suggests he is thinking in a ‘musicalist’ way, painting a theme and variations (or, we might say, improvising on a standard). And as she points out, this may be confirmed by his statement to Kandinsky that he had discovered a relationship between transparent colours ‘comparable to musical notes’, and the movement of colour, in terms of pictorial depth and across the picture plane, was analogous to the development of harmonic and melodic structures.48 This painting was followed by an even larger work 2e Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 2e partie 5 motifs.49 This painting propels the eye along the work successively, adding a real dimension of temporality as the viewer physically moves to ‘read’ the image. It is the body that moves through time, rather than the work as in music. However, in much the same way that Bergson reminded us, we compress time in the comprehension of music, so here we can glance back and forward so as to gain a simultaneous (or series of simultaneous) aesthetic experience(s). This temporal element was extended in Sonia’s addition to their friend the poet Blaise Cendrar’s poem ‘La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France’. This is a work that consists of a single folded sheet, 2 meters long, that, as Marjorie Perloff puts it, ‘unfolds like an accordion’, with a vertical text on the right, and an abstract painted image on the left (see Figure 3.1); indeed the work’s structure is echoed in the poem itself: the world ‘stretches lengthens and retracts like an accordion / tormented by a sadistic player’. The text is printed in different colours and varied typography. The intention was explained in the subtitle of the work, ‘poèmes, couleurs simultanées de tirage atteignant la hauteur de la Tour Eiffel: 150 exemplaires numérotées et signés’, to produce an image-text work that was both ‘readable’ simultaneously and sequentially (and, multiplied by the 150 signed and numbered copies, would reach to the top of the Eiffel Tower: 2 m × 150 = 300 m). This ‘accordion’ of a work is in turn dedicated to ‘the musicians’. Who exactly is meant by this is not clear and it may be just ‘music’ in general, but the reference to

106

Improvision

Figure 3.1 Sonia Delaunay/Blaise Cendrars, La prose du transsibérien et de la petite jehanne de france. Couleurs simultanées de mme delaunay-terk, detail from the opening. Paris, éditions des hommes nouveaux, 1913. 50 × 39.9 cm. © Art Digital Studio.

Orphism and a New Tune II

107

music again signals another element of the simultaneity as opsis and lexis meeting melos (additionally, within lexis there is conflation between verse and prose; ‘La Prose du Traanssibérien . . . poèmes, couleurs simultanées . . .’). In his review of the work Apollinaire tellingly wrote: Blaise Cendrars and Mme Delaunay-Terk have carried out a unique experiment in simultaneity, written in contrasting colours in order to train the eye to read with one glance the whole of the poem, even as an orchestral conductor reads with one glance the notes placed up and down the bar, even as one reads with a single glance the plastic elements printed on a poster.50

As Perloff has shown in her detailed discussion of this work, it conjoins a range of ideas on a number of different levels, for example in the text, between high and low culture in its interest in advertising (what Cendrars elsewhere calls ‘the flower of contemporary life’); its reference to the stuff of modern life, ‘alarm clocks’, ‘hatboxes’, ‘cylinders’, ‘Sheffield corkscrews’, etc.; its interest in space and geography, as the text passes through the whole of Europe and further, referencing China and Mexico; its interest in time in its reference to the past, the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, the hanging gardens of Babylon (704–681 BC), childhood, adolescence, and to clocks; its concern with the speed of travel itself: it starts in Moscow on a Friday morning in December and ends (with a coda) in Paris, ‘City of the incomparable Tower of the Rack and the Wheel’ – the great Ferris wheel erected next to the Eiffel Tower for the 1900 Paris Exposition, and the Eiffel Tower itself. This marked the new zero meridian for France and the first broadcast took place from it in 1898, and later the first public radio programme in 1921. Around the time of La Prose du Transsibérien on 1 July 1913, the first time signal was transmitted around the world, promising another form of ‘simultaneity’.51 As Blériot famously announced following his first flight across the channel, ‘England is no longer an island’, and as Perloff reminds us, in 1913 you could travel from the Urals to the Atlantic without a passport. Nowhere was this international simultaneity of modernity more evident than in the arts – and jazz’s cosmopolitanism was a key element in this. This space–time compression can be seen throughout the poem. For example, as Jehanne (‘la petite Jehanne de France’, a modern Joan of Arc) sleeps, the narrator muses: ‘Every morning all the clocks are set/The train is set forward and the sun is set back.’52 The rhythm of the poem and image echo the train and the flow of the modern world – the text often follows the rhythms of speech and a locomotive/motor pulse provided by repetition, that in turn relates to sexual energy, desire and violence. In this way Cendrars pulls the mechanical and physical together, bodies and rhythm (to say nothing of presaging the Russian Revolution). Delaunay too pulls together bodies and rhythm, but in her case it is manifested as design and objects. Her painting is not entirely abstract, but it is far from an illustration or mere decoration of the text. It starts at the top with shapes that connect to the general outline of towers, squares and bells of Moscow, through circular forms (of wheels and movement), it unfolds to the bottom and includes a simplified Eiffel Tower with Ferris wheel behind. Another of the simultaneous contrasts is this pull of the image vertically against the horizontal drive

108

Improvision

of the narrative; the image flows with interlocking gestures that answer each other as they mesh. More pragmatically, the whole image-text travelled as much as its subject matter does. It went on tour to the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the Herbst Salon in Berlin, to London, Moscow, St Petersburg and New York. As Perloff succinctly puts it, ‘It became not only a poem but an event, a happening.’ As Apollinaire had explained earlier, the work became a score, having a performance reading in Paris at the Montjoie! Exposition on 24 February 1914, given by Lucy Wilhelm, who started the reading by standing on a chair to read the poem which had been hung high on the wall to accommodate its length, concluding by slowly moving into a sitting position on a chair to read the coda.53 The simultaneity thus extended from performance, across media, space and time. It is one of the most interesting, if under-appreciated, early twentieth-century inter-media art works.

Charles Delaunay The Delaunays’ son, Henri Pierre Charles, was born two years before the publication of La Prose du Transsibérien, on 18 January 1911.54 From an early age he found himself drawn to, and absorbed by, the sights and sounds of jazz. His parents started to collect jazz records, but Robert, a man who ‘did not live beyond his art’, was not a natural father. ‘I always regretted that I did not have a true father.’55 Robert passed these 78s to his son, who soon found in them solace and inspiration. Charles reports that he detected in this music an explicit and significant modernism, a reworking, as he says, of the fundamentals of music, in much the way the abstraction of his parents’ works questioned the foundations of art.56 After first supplementing this collection with many others he acquired through bartering his poster work to a record company, he eventually abandoned his profession as a commercial artist, moving away from the visual culture of his parents’ work, explicitly to take up his passion for jazz. He saw this as his own contribution to modernism, not in imitation of his parents, and not primarily as a producer (although he played the drums), but as a facilitator, critic and recording director.57 It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Charles Delaunay for the early history of jazz in Europe and beyond.58 He became the dominant influence in the first French jazz club, which in 1931 was called the Jazz Club Universitaire, to be reborn a year later as the Hot Club de France. The ambition of the club and its members was simply stated in its ‘manifesto’: ‘First, organize the enthusiasts of jazz hot; and second, by spreading the word about jazz, aid it in becoming appreciated, defend it, and help it conquer the place it merits among movements of artistic expression of our times.’59 Charles and his colleagues were tireless in their lecturing, writing, cataloguing, philosophizing and organizing of an essentially improvised art form, because they recognized it as ‘clearly the music of our time’.60 Charles was also significant in his recognition, promotion and support for two very important French jazz musicians, Django Reinhardt (a Romani, born in Belgium but resident in Paris) and Stéphane Grappelli (born Stefano, of mixed French and Italian

Orphism and a New Tune II

109

background), who formed an ensemble unique in jazz at that time: à cordes. As Django’s biographer Michael Dregni has put it, ‘Jazz was trumpets, clarinets, and pianos, with drums essential for making it move. Violins were for Mozart; playing jazz on a violin was practically sacrilege. Guitars were for wooing maidens on balconies, or at best mere rhythm makers for serious instruments . . . nobody was looking for a jazz band composed of Gypsies and Frenchmen’61 Nevertheless Gypsies and Frenchmen formed the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in 1934, which Charles not only supported but recorded.62 Again, as Dregni succinctly put it, ‘Without Delaunay, who can guess how little of this music would have survived.’63 And as Charles put it after his first live jazz concert at the Hot Club on 29 March 1933 (he had previously only heard jazz on records and the radio): ‘To describe the impression I got from this very first jazz concert ever to reach my ears remains utterly impossible. I was glued to my seat, paralyzed by emotion to the point that the guy next to me became uneasy and carefully inquired whether I was pleased by “that sound” and feeling well.’64 Charles’s parents, Robert and Sonia, were also drawn, twenty years earlier, to ragtime and the latest dances. They, together with Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, were regulars at the Bal Bullier on the Avenue de l’Observatoire, a dance club where ‘animal dances’, such as the fox trot, grizzly bear, turkey trot and bunny hug, together with the recent importation of the tango, were enthusiastically taken up to the accompaniment of rags and jazz. While some were, perhaps, less inclined to get to their feet, their close friend, the Italian artist and leading member of the Futurist circle, Gino Severini, was not inhibited. He said of this time, these places ‘were expensive but, being a good dancer, I soon was admitted free and received special favours in all of them’.65 Severini was also interested in translating these experiences into paint, which he refered to as sensazione dinamica (dynamic sensation). He saw the depiction of dance as a challenge to the notion of a static art (an idea promoted by both Apollinaire and the Futurists), and with the moving power of music as part of a synaesthesia. He deals with the subject in a series of canvases that in many ways culminate with the ‘plastic analogy’66 work Bear Dance = Sail Boat + Vase of Flowers (1914) a work he explained thus: On one side I grouped all the colours and forms of heat, of the dance, of joy, and on the other all the colours and forms of freshness, of transparency, of noises and sounds; while in the centre I bunch form-colours in contrast to the form colours at the sides; and this bunch of dynamic forms unites the elements to right and left and corresponds to sensations of the sky, of the atmosphere, of electric light, of flesh, of cloth, etc.67

Severini’s ambition here is to produce a synaesthetic image, and a synthetic one. A figure presented in the simultaneous vison of a sequence of successive movements and subject to the systematic deconstruction, figures that he regards as subjected to constant vibration and resonance effects. It is a painting in which the process of abstraction allows for analogical ‘reading’. Plastic objects within the image can signify more than one referent. In addition, the image represents the painter’s state of mind, compressing a variety of sensory experiences. Following Bergson, memory becomes central and

110

Improvision

colour was capable of attaining through analogies ‘the greatest luminous intensity, heat, musicality, and optical and constructional dynamism’.68 In addition his painting utilizes text, evokes sounds and the phenomenology of movement, expressed through a type of divisionism and abstract forms using the colour theories of Chevreuil and others, in a way similar to that of Sonia and Robert Delanunay, although via a different technique. The initial subject of this painting is the rather ungainly two-step ‘animal dance’, which he himself must have performed many times, the Grizzly Bear. Such dances were an abstraction from vague animal movements (the heavy sideways step of the dancing bear, the hop of the Bunny Hug, etc.). The principle characteristic of this type of ragtime dance was what was often seen as their ‘degenerate’ nature, requiring close contact between the couple and their physicality, earning them the popular alternative name ‘freak dances’.69 They were eventually superseded by the growth in popularity of the fox trot and the tango. But the fashion for all these dances in Europe was spread by the ‘purified’, toned-down versions performed by the professional duo of Vernon and Irene Castle, who became the most emulated and influential society ballroom dancers of their era.70 Charles Delaunay was also the spur for another early abstract image. As Sonia put it herself: ‘About 1911 I had the idea of making for Charles, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.’71 The importance of ‘applied’ art to the development of an abstract visual language is significant, but one of Sonia Delaunay’s most ambitions paintings at this time is also important and more apposite for my discussion. In her return to painting she challenges Robert’s large 2e Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 2e partie 5 motifs. Her monumental twelve-foot long canvas was named after the dance hall, the Bal Bullier.72 She said of this time, ‘Every Thursday we used to meet our painter and poet friends at the Bal Bullier, among the students and midinettes. The fox-trot, the tango had just appeared there. The continuous, undulating rhythm of the tango caused my colours to “move”. I painted Bal Bullier and, later, the Electric Prisms.’73 This remarkable work utilizes the colour theory of Chevreuil and represents a major return to painting after the birth of her son. The ambition to create movement was achieved both by the format of the work, which at over 12 feet long and 3 feet high (97 × 390 cm) compels the viewer to move along its length so that it ‘unfolds’ before the eye. Here, the movement is horizontal as opposed to the vertical movement of her large painting for La prose du transsibérien. Chevreuil’s ideas of simultaneous colour contrast, as already mentioned, were key to both her and Robert’s aesthetic. Its central finding was described by Chevreuil in the following terms: If we look simultaneously upon two stripes of different tones of the same colour, or upon two stripes of the same tone of different colours placed side by side, if the stripes are not too wide, the eye perceives certain modifications which in the first place influence the intensity of colour, and in the second, the optical composition of the two juxtaposed colours respectively.

Orphism and a New Tune II

111

Now as these modifications make the stripes appear different from what they really are, I give to them the name of simultaneous contrast of colours; and I call contrast of tone the modification in intensity of colour, and contrast of colour that which affects the optical composition of each juxtaposed colour.74

Sonia develops these ideas within a post-cubist visual language in a number of ways. The physical make-up of dancers is broken up and fused, just as is the ‘background’ or environment. The environment is also compressed and integrated with the figures, so that the optical space between foreground and background is pushed against the picture plane. Areas of primary and secondary colour contrast are developed, so that primary opposites like red and green, or secondary opposites like orange and purple, are placed proximate to one another to produce a scintillation between them and a subsequent amplification of their hue. The expected ‘zing’ produced by these colour contrasts forms a visual analogue to the syncopation of the music that moved the dancers. The rhythm of the composition complements this with the beat produced by the initial swirl of colours that lead into the group of figures placed first swaying to the left, then straight up and finally answering by swaying to the right. The viewer is then lead both physically and visually to the climax of the work, on or about the golden section, in the fused, embracing dancers who are lifted higher than the rest and picked out in contrasting red and green. This composite figure is entwined below a pulse of three circular lights that lead the eye to the right and thus to a ‘coda’ that balances the initial abstract conflagration of colours on the far left (so that the initial red and green colour gesture on the far left is inverted on the far right). That this painting should be made up of dance, music and lights is indicative of Orphism, as is its central idea of united couples. The theme reflects back on the key event of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but here music (in the guise of the tango) is successful in its simultaneity rather than separation. In relation to the other painting she mentioned above, Prismes électriques, Sonia wrote that the inspiration was the streetlamps in the newly electrified boulevards. She noted ‘the halos made colours and the shadows turn and vibrate around us’.75 Swirling shadows and colours, as she had painted in Bal, emphasized vibration and movement that made rhythm a fulcrum of composition. Robert was also drawn to prismatic light and the rhythms of sight, and he too produced a series of ‘multi-coloured halos’ in his 1913–14 prismes series. He wrote in a letter to Auguste Macke in 1913: It is only in this way that I have found the laws of the complementary and simultaneous contrast of colours which nourish the very rhythms of my vision . . . Above all, I always see the sun! Since I wish for identification of myself and others, there is everywhere a halo, halos, movements of colours. And I believe that this is the rhythm. To see is a movement. Vision is the true creative rhythm; to discern the quality of rhythm is a movement and the essential quality of painting is representation, the movement of vision which functions by becoming aware of reality.76

112

Improvision

Even if both the Delaunays confused, intellectually, the nature of musical comprehension, their experience of music was, as Bergson explained, evidenced in both Sonia’s painting of the Bal Bullier and Severini’s Bear Dance.

Apollinaire’s perspective Apollinaire’s analysis of Orphism was always incomplete, as it was formulated in a continuum; in the vortex of moves by different artists towards non-figurative representation. Further, his criticism is sometimes misunderstood (not least by some of the artists he wrote about), in that the distance between his poetry and his criticism was not necessarily a difference in kind. Apollinaire was deliberately ambiguous and sometimes obscure in his pronouncements, seeing his job as commentating, awakening a sense of mystery and of the complex act of creation, rather than simply that of explicator. As Pamela Genova has put it in relation to his writings on Picasso: Apollinaire’s music and plasticity create a new realm of artistic potential that reveals a deep and subtle system of correspondence in both literary and visual art . . . Moving beyond the parameters of a journalistic style of criticism, or a docile textbook approach to art history, Apollinaire’s . . . take on a chameleonlike power of movement, engendering unique forms of an avant-garde improvisation, the painting of prose poetry.77

What Apollinaire did disclose was a general tendency in these artists towards abstraction in the wake of cubist developments, and named it after the god of a music so powerful as to animate all nature, and his writing partakes of this as much as the art he discusses. While it may have been the case that Picabia and Duchamp were interested in the means by which subjective experience might be envisioned, Robert Delaunay and Léger were more interested in new ways of representing sensation and sense experience. Sonia Delaunay and Kupka were not mentioned by Apollinaire, even though they met his aesthetic criteria more effectively than most. Nevertheless, it was Robert Delaunay who acted as Apollinaire’s guiding aesthetician in practice, and the significance flowed in the other direction too: ‘It needed an Apollinaire to disclose the first steps,78 the first cells of this new art; in a brilliant way he made the fundamental definitions between traditional painting and that which was evolving, definitions which still retain their full value.’79 Robert’s influence, as Virginia Spate has argued, is evident from the changes that can be seen in the proofs for the copy of Les Peintres Cubistes. Here Apollinaire expresses reservations about the ‘purity’ of the works of Picabia and Duchamp, implicitly judging them against Delaunay. It is, however, in part this ‘impurity’ that makes them both fit with the paradigm of jazz. The key issue here is the confusion of the idea of ‘purity’ with a type of innate intelligence, a sort of ‘fundamental understanding’. The access to this idea was sort

Orphism and a New Tune II

113

through the removal of accrued aesthetic practice and expectation. By thus removing convention it was hoped that a more direct, abstract language might emerge. Central to this for Apollinaire was the place of time and the tension between the external fragmentation of time and the living continuity of consciousness and the integrity of inner imaginative states; an aspiration to circumvent conventional conceptions of time (fourth dimension) through the act of creation, at a time when the modern world was subject to new modes of temporal experience.80 The development of such an abstract visual language could then penetrate to the soul in the direct way music could. Orpheus, in his dual nature as both Apollonian and Dionysian, is the ideal aesthetic midwife for such a conception, as the idea sits between conscious and unconscious motivations. As Apollinaire appreciated in relation to the paradigm of music, words may give shape to consciousness, but language betrayed the reality of inner experience if it slipped too easily into the expression of ideas or forgot the power of mystery (and not knowing). This is what Mallarmé called ‘the Orphic explanation of the Universe’, language restored to its ‘original rhythms’.81 The question was how to access this ‘innate’ intelligence. The model offered by jazz was improvisation, even as that concept was misconceived in the context of racist assumptions about black cultural expression in the early years of the twentieth century. We can see Apollinaire groping in this direction in a statement he made in relation to Braque in November 1908: His compositions have the expected harmony and fullness. His decorations bear witness to a taste and a culture guaranteed by his instinct. Drawing from himself the elements of the synthetic motifs which he represents he becomes a creator. He no longer owes anything to the things around him. His mind deliberately produced the twilight of reality . . . A lyricism of color . . . fills him with harmonious enthusiasm, and it is Saint Cecilia herself who makes his instrument sound [and in this way] . . . the painter, the poet, the artist . . . [is able to fashion] a new world with its own particular laws.82

Orphism is here linked to a primeval impulse, one that was inspired by Bergson’s ideas in L’Evolution créatrice, that ‘primitive’ societies link instinct and intelligence in fundamental ways where modern societies do not. Bergson wrote; ‘That is to say that intelligence and instinct, having begun to interpenetrate, they have always conserved something of their common origin.’83 For Bergson, intuition is not a crude elemental impulse, rather it is a mode of reflection, a way to think in duration (within the continuous flow of reality and experience): an approach not unrelated to the later ideas of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihályi’s concept of the ‘flow state’.84 This complete absorption in an activity and consequent lack of awareness of temporal movement may not have been specifically addressed by Bergson, but it could be used to characterize a special type of engagement in activities which are contiguous with ‘thinking in duration’.85 It is also fundamental to effective jazz improvisation and indicative of certain types of gestural abstract painting. An outstanding example is the French artist Fabienne Verdier, to be discussed in the final chapter. Elsewhere Bergson goes on to argue that language is not able to convey all shades of inner states, what he calls ‘colourings’, from objective and impersonal states.86 For

114

Improvision

Apollinaire, too, the modern artist is the person who is able to express this direct (sometimes called ‘pure’) interior language that links us to the rest of the universe, and this is likely to be achieved most successfully through the rejection of established artistic languages.87 Robert Delaunay had made a related point in connection with his abstract Formes circulaires. ‘All is roundness, sun, earth, horizons, fullness of intense life, of poetry which one cannot make verbal.’88 For him the visual gesture of ‘forms circulaires’ is more universal and complete than a verbal signifier. The awareness of consciousness through attention to non-referential form is the aim of Delaunay’s art and is the essence of both painterly abstraction and of music: ‘Our understanding is correlated to our perception. Let us try to see.’89 Where language is limited, the visual gesture may exceed it. Visual gesture has this ‘excess’, and this difference is best expressed in the new spirit in modern painting by the non-mimetic, that which is best placed to exploit it, as music exploits the ‘excess’ of language when conscious and objective meaning is extracted.

Illumination For Apollinaire this put the orphic impulse in to modern painting, what he describes as its ‘anti-academic and luminous tendency’, in turn ‘[t]his tendency leads to a form of poetic painting that goes beyond visual perception’.90 He goes on to sweep up a number of other paintings into an orphic impulse. ‘The most interesting German painters, such as Kandinsky, Marc, Meidner, Macke, Jan Censky, Münter, Otto Freundlich, etc., belong – instinctively – to this movement . . . The Italian Futurists . . . also belong to Orphism.’91 The fundamental prerequisite for art is illumination, and here Apollinaire develops Delaunay’s position: ‘This creative tendency now extends throughout the universe. Painting is not an imitative, but a creative art. With the movements of Orphism and cubism we arrive at the complete poetry in bright light. I love the art of the modern painters, because I love light more than anything else. And because all human beings love light more than anything else, they invented fire.’92 And elsewhere he grounds this universal point, ‘The first paintings were simply a line encircling the shadow of a man made by the sun on the surface of the earth.’93 In this way light (also in the modern miracle of electric light, the newly electrified boulevards) is linked to primitivism in that it re-establishes the most fundamental tool for human’s illumination and understanding. This complex mix of modern and primitive is also echoed in Blaise Cendres ‘Les Poètes modernes dans l’ensemble de la vie contemporaine’, his c. 1919 assessment of lyricism in poetry prior to the First World War: Today’s poet is the total opposite of a degenerate. He has grasped the consciousness of his period. He is the consciousness of this period. When he wanted to express it, he found himself as wretched and defenceless in front of the complexity of the modern world as a savage armed with stones in front of the beasts of the brush. And he often employed the language of the savage. It was a necessity.94

Orphism and a New Tune II

115

This conflation of the modern and primitive was, as we have seen, complex but far from uncommon. Within an ideology of primitivism, the most straightforward recourse was often to simple racist stereotypes concordant with the colonial project. Often, the most the avant-garde did to such idealizations of the primitive was to invert them, to prioritize instinct and the ‘primitive’ above the supposed superiority of Western civilization. This was pursued to promote the outsider, to call out the value of alternative cultures, to challenge those of the establishment, even when key racist assumptions were left intact. It was felt that to go forward, art had to look back, or, as Apollinaire put it in a letter to Breton in 1916, ‘In order to reach far, one must first return to first principles.’95

Ideograms, sounds, words Severini too sought a common and fundamental ground on which a modernist aesthetics might be based. Like Robert Delaunay, he believed that visual gestures were more universal than words and was also drawn to abstracted, circular forms and concentric patterns. Such shapes worked to unify the picture plane and could be seen to translate kinetic energy into rotary motion to produce the sort of dynamism he was after. Above all, they might be used to reproduce the spherical expansion of light in space. This provided a visual language, in part derived from cubist explorations of space in relation to the picture plane, that allowed for the incorporation of words analogous with imagery. Like Apollinaire (who devised ‘calligrammes’, poems as visual images) Severini developed this idea into a theory of the ideogram, his painting called Danzatrice = mare or Dancer = Airplane + Sea proposes the incorporation of words and dynamic abstract forms which comes directly out of cubism. But rather than the formal experiments of the cubists, Severini saw his works not as simply paintings, but as visual poems: ‘the words were important not just pictorially, for their value as lines and tones, but also for their basic meaning; so it was a kind of visual poem.’96 He argued that because of modernism’s complexity and constant change the ideogram’s liminal position, poised between language and image, rendered it the ideal modernist symbol. This complex realism completely destroys the subject’s integrality, considered henceforth at the height of its vitality, which can be expressed as follows: dancer = airplane = sea . . . The complementary images I intend to exploit do not aspire to the condition of ‘metaphor’ (that is to designate one thing by comparison or by opposition to another), but I intend to create a new reality: from the dancer and the airplane emerges the sea.97

In 1916 he wrote – ‘Since our intensive and extensive life requires more and more synthesis and rapidity, our primitivism may well be expressed some day by a new ideography, plastic as well as literary, enclosing great expanses of the Universe within conventional and autonomous signs.’98 Severini recognized that this was a tendency towards a primitivist sensibility for heteronomy. Above all, such ideograms incorporated sights and sounds: reality consists of not just what is visible, ‘It consist above all of Heat

116

Improvision

and Light, and to a lesser extent of Sounds, Noises, Odours, and Weights.’99 Words not only represent sounds, but they do sound (aided by dynamic abstract visual forms, often the star-burst pattern). Sounds and noises also come from Marinetti’s words-infreedom and onomatopoeia (e.g. BRILLA BRILLA BRIIILLA stzssssssss – [SHINE SHIINE SHIIIINE stzssssssss], which is additionally a move from light to sound). This is not a pure music, it is closer to noise and the percussive sounds of jazz, closer to scat, than opera.100 As Apollinaire and Severini approached art through their ideograms and calligrammes, so Picabia and Duchamp approached text through their visual art – words and image mixed rather than separated. The mid-ground was occupied by the idea of music, and it is often the ideas of music, not its practice, that are invoked. There is, in early modernism, a constant tension between the ‘idea of music’ and specific works or types of music. What is asserted here is simply that there are different ‘ideas of music’. While Apollinaire may have had an almost platonic sense of ‘pure music’ in mind in his pronouncements, many of the most appropriate analogues between visual art practice and ideas of music come from the contemporary musical form of jazz. In addition, it is important to recognize that Apollinaire resisted the direct evocation of music as a model for Orphist painting, not because he did not believe there was one but because, like the artists he wrote about, he wished to avoid the obvious and trite equation of one art form with the other, as if art was trying to ‘illustrate’ music. Apollinaire was little engaged by the art music of his own time, while promoting the idea of music as, in many ways, like Pater, the condition to which all arts might aspire, he was not much engaged by its sound. This notion of purity relates to the Promethean example of flame as a vehicle of light: ‘The flame has purity which tolerates nothing foreign and cruelly transforms within itself what it catches.’101 But this metaphor also contains the idea of transfiguration, from thing to ash, a deconstruction of matter, a move from one state to another, from object to abstraction. The power over nature, that is represented in the myth of Prometheus and that of Orpheus, is central to Apollinaire’s interest in the question ‘of what it is, in words or paint or sounds, that can give the artist power over the world’, as Spate puts it.102 The answer for Apollinaire, Spate continues, is Duchamp’s ‘musical perceptions of nature’; the inner life of forms. When Apollinaire describes Duchamp as ‘strive[ing] to give aesthetic form to musical perceptions of nature’ and ‘forswear[ing] the caprice and the inexpressive arabesque of music’ he is making a point about aspiring to that condition, while not being distracted by music’s decorative (sonic) qualities.103 Delaunay, as mentioned, was also keen to differentiate between music and painting, seeing the former as successive, the latter ‘simultaneous’. However misguided this notion might be, it underlines the idea surrounding Orphism that while there were significant similarities between the arts in the form of ideograms and ‘musicalist’ painting, they cannot simply be conflated as equivalent. At root Orphism supposes that life is unified by an essence which is regulated by rhythm and harmony, a belief that runs through the myth of Orpheus, giving him his power over the animate and inanimate in nature through music. What gives music power as a paradigm in modernity is that it represents the polyphony behind ‘mere appearance’ that articulates the multiform modern experience. In Apollinaire’s view,

Orphism and a New Tune II

117

this is what both Picabia and Duchamp are striving for, and Delaunay and Léger in their different ways; it is also what is concealed behind the composite ‘signs’ Severini was constructing. It is what Kandinsky signalled in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with his quotation from Goethe at the head of his chapter on ‘The Language of Forms and Colours’: [painting] ‘has long since lacked knowledge of any Generalbass; it lacks any established, accepted theory as exists in music’. Goethe’s ‘prophetic’ utterance, Kandinsky claimed, ‘anticipates the situation in which painting finds itself today’.104

Part 2 Picabia and music Picabia’s early work was Impressionist, but he was even at this time also interested in free-composed drawing. The critic L. Roger-Milès stressed the importance of these drawings in counterpoint to his studies from nature. He draws ‘like a virtuoso seated at the clavier . . . who throws himself . . . into improvisations . . . which follow the movements of his psychic disposition, so Picabia seeks forms, constructions of lines, configurations of spaces which his eye has retained and whose real character his mind wishes to uncover.’105 As Spate explains, this may account for the abstract drawings that Gabrielle Buffet claimed Picabia drew before she met him. She said that while they talked he would often continue to draw ‘frightening forms which shaped themselves automatically under his pencil: erotic monsters, half-man, half-animal, an entire hallucinating universe which he carried within him’.106 This interest and practice of improvised drawing continued for many years, even in the case of his larger abstract paintings and links his Orphist and Dadaist inclinations. In Les Peintres Cubistes, Apollinaire, sensitive to the ‘piano improvisor’ in him, describes Picabia’s art as close to music, but where music proceeds through suggestion, visual art, he claims, proceeds through concrete forms. Picabia’s art does not use colour, for example, as symbolic, but as literal: colour is presented as abstract form. This literalism also extends to the titles of the works and, by extension, to the use of words within the image. Titles should not be mistaken for an indication of subject, he warns: ‘It must separate intellectualism from decadence and ward off the danger painters always face of becoming writers of literature.’107 Picabia’s wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, makes a related point a few months later in a special issue of the journal Camera Work, published by Steiglitz in New York. She makes a comparison between the titles of Picabia’s paintings and those of musical compositions. Her significance to the development of Picabia’s aesthetic at this time can hardly be over emphasized. As both an intellectual interlocutor and a practicing musician she understood the artistic avant-garde from the perspective of both Symbolism and music. She had trained with Vincent d’Indy in Paris and studied with the radical and innovative composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin.108 In Picabia’s growing dissatification with conventional painting, she helped him see the possibility of a painting in which ‘forms and colours [were] freed from their sensorial attributes’ and that would allow

118

Improvision

him to continue the improvisatory composition by which he was stimulated, that was ‘situated in pure invention which recreates the world according to its own desires and its own imagination’.109 In doing this, the ideas of the Synthetists are significant (Buffet was familiar with them via her interest in Symbolism). Their ideas about painting from memory, as a mechanism for the simplification of form and the elimination of nonessentials in the construction of pictorial composition, showed Picabia a way forward, so much so that his new paintings around 1908, such as Paysage and Pasage à Cassis,110 boldly flatten pictorial space and lay on simplified blocks of colour that verge on the abstract. His 1909 work Caoutchouc rivals Kupka’s contemporary studies for his Amorpha painting.111 That such a fluid and formally ambiguous image should be titled after Indian rubber is not so surprising. The play in the title does, however, point to the growing interest in both Picabia and Duchamp’s work of this time, in witty, ironic and complex titles that set up tensions between word and image, inside and outside the painting. As Spate points out, however, where Kupka developed his abstractions methodically, Picabia pulled back from the implications of Caoutchouc until around 1913. Nevertheless, such works of invention and improvisation point to the Orphic presage of his aesthetic. Returning to Buffet’s later article in Camera Work, we can see the development of this tendency in that year, 1913, when music, and ragtime and jazz specifically, operate as both subject matter and formal model for Picabia’s continued interest in improvisation. She suggests that the viewer should ‘not look for anything more in it than the abstract suggestion of the impression that has impelled the artist to express himself ’. For example, ‘If he calls some of his recent water-colors “New York” or “Negro Song” it is only because he did them when stimulated by the impression of the city or by the bizarre rhythms of ragtime.’ As a sophisticated musician, we might have suspected that the relatively straightforward syncopation of ragtime would not be perceived as ‘bizarre’ (although it is possible that she was writing with the expectations of her potential audience in mind). She then takes up the suggestion that we should surrender to ‘the emotional impression which we felt when we listen to music. For the expressive value of line and color is as logical as that of sound.’112 However, it is possible, she argues, that the basic grammar of visual art may be even more fundamental that that of music (line and colour, rather than the ‘arbitrary laws of composition and harmony’) and that, therefore, the former can be appreciated without ‘a long education’. The text thus neatly slips from a reliance on ‘meaning’ in intention, to a reliance on ‘consciousness’ and feeling in reception. This move from the literal to the felt is additionally a move from symbolic to concrete forms, supporting Apollinaire’s claim that Picabia’s visual art proceeds through ‘concrete forms’. This was the nature of the aspiration to abstraction, to move from an art where ‘meaning’ lay in the symbolic use of colour and form, or in the relationship of colour and form to something in the outside world, to an art (like music) where meaning or significance lay in art’s own physical reality as form. Despite the often special pleading for a species of ‘purism’ based on an absolute model of music, Picabia, like Duchamp, had an abiding interest in a hybrid and ‘jazzier’ sensibility; one where inscription, words, puns and other ways in which language might be seen to slip free of simple signification and invade the space of art (as happens

Orphism and a New Tune II

119

in different ways in cubism and Severini’s works). It is this that Apollinaire, Duchamp, Buffet and Picabia share. They are all attempting to avoid an art which is perceived in terms of the simple reduction of one sign to another. And while language might be seen as a paradigm here, it is also capable, in poetry, of slipping away from straightforward signification. However, while there was, in early modernism, support for the Horatian belief that ut pictura poesis, perhaps the more powerful paradigm was ut pictura musica.113 The move to abstraction in the visual arts and away from the figurative was not to be reduced to another equivalent form of illustration or imitation, that of one art from, or by, another. Lessons between arts could be learned, but analogies had to be hard won and differences at the superficial level acknowledged. Duchamp and Picabia were aided in their play with language by Apollinaire, who was at the time not only more widely read than either artist, but also an advanced poet. Their mutual interest in word play, puns and humour, laid down fundamental principles that Duchamp, in particular, was to develop in profoundly significant ways throughout his career as an artist.

Duchamp and words In May 1912 Apollinaire, accompanied by Picabia, Buffet and Duchamp, attended a performance of Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique. The première was at the Théatre Antoine from 11 May to 5 June 1912. Duchamp later wrote recalling the significance of Roussel’s play: ‘He was a revelation for all three [sic] of us. He was really a new man at that time.’114 Duchamp already felt comfortable accepting the influence of a writer, in part because he was still smarting from the rejection of his Nude Descending a Staircase, No.  2 by the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants (which included his two brothers and Gleizes and Metzinger among others) in March that year. This interest in writing was also because he wanted to escape the cliché of the familiar French expression bête comme un peintre; ‘What mattered was an attitude, more than an influence’, he later said.115 And this attitude was one of ‘antisense’. This was generated by an attack on language, not just the image. He explained in retrospect: Titles in general interested me a lot. At that time [spring 1912] I was becoming literary. Words interested me; and the bringing together of words to which I added a comma and ‘even’, an adverb which makes no sense since it relates to nothing in the picture or the title. Thus it was an adverb in the most beautiful demonstration of adverbness. It has no meaning. This antisense interested me a lot on the poetic level . . . when I did it, I had no idea of its value . . . It’s a ‘non-sense.’116

This interest in titles he shared with Picabia. Antisense functions on the poetic level, that is the level at which language approaches music, once it leaves its explicit role behind, when it has no ‘sense’ it functions closer to just sound; a form of play. Apollinaire had also played with meanings in his Calligrammes; not with irony as Duchamp was to do, but by destabilizing meaning through visual displacement.

120

Improvision

But Duchamp’s approach was informed more by Roussel’s aesthetic method, which Roussel explains at some length in Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I wrote certain of my books). It is worth quoting in detail: I chose two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams). For example, ‘billard’ [billard table] and ‘pillard’. To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases. In the case of ‘billard’ and ‘pillard’ the two phrases I obstained were: 1. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard . . . [The white letters on the cushion of the old billiard table . . . ] 2. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard . . . [The white man’s letters on the hords of the old plunderer . . . ] In the first, ‘lettres’ was taken in the sense of lettering, ‘blanc’ in the sense of a cube of chalk, and ‘bandes’ as in cushions. In the second, ‘lettres’ was taken in the sense of missives, ‘blanc’ as in white man, and ‘bandes’ as in hordes The two phrases found, it was a case of writing a story which could begin with the first and end with the second.

He would also transform a common phrase with similar sounds. A line from Victor Hugo, ‘Un vase tout rempli du vin de l’espérance’ was rephrased by Roussel as ‘sept houx rampe lit Vesper’, which was developed in to a tale of Handel using seven bunches of holly tied with different coloured ribbons to compose, on a banister, the principle theme of his oratorio ‘Vesper’.117 Such non-sense language games became central to Duchamp’s evolving aesthetic, and also appealed to Picabia. With his rejection from the Salon des Indépendants, and therefore, effectively, from the Groupe de Puteaux, Duchamp sought solace with Apollinaire and especially Picabia and the world of the ‘author’, and with a type of art less pure and more dependent on hybridity: The amusing thing about literary people of that time was that when you met two authors you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was a series of fireworks, jokes, lies, all unstoppable, because it was such a style that you were incapable of speaking their language; so you kept quiet. One day, I went with Picabia to have lunch with Max Jacob and Apollinaire – it was unbelievable. One was torn between a sort of anguish and an insane laughter.118

For Duchamp and Picabia the poetry and music of Orpheus was important in animating the world, but it was achieved via a form of psychic painting. Picabia explained in a statement he made a couple of years later, in 1915, that he had for seven years been trying to make painting ‘that would live by its own resources, like music. I was trying to make psychic painting.’ While those of a Symbolist bent would describe this as music directly affecting the soul, Picabia and Duchamp might have thought more in terms of the psyche. Nevertheless, the aspiration was the same, and as

Orphism and a New Tune II

121

Apollinaire had said of Picabia his art was as closely related to music as was possible for an art that used another medium of expression. One of the most important shifts in the centres of gravity for these two painters in this same year, 1913, was their inclusion in an American exhibition, which provided Duchamp with a chance to reinvent himself as an artist, not a painter, and for Picabia to come into first-hand contact with a new kind of music, already mentioned by Buffet, American jazz.

The Armory Show: New York 1913 On the 14 January 1913 Picabia and Buffet sailed from Le Havre aboard La Lorraine to attend and support a new major exhibition of modern art in New York (they returned a month after the exhibition closed). What became simply known as the Armory Show was, in fact, the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), held in New York city on Lexington Avenue, in the 69th Regiment’s Armory building, between 17 February and 15 March 1913. It then toured to Chicago and Boston. The three figures principally responsible for the selection of works were the American artists Walt Kuhn (who was Secretary of the AAPS), Arthur B. Davis (who was the President of the AAPS) and Walter Pach. Pach was a good friend of the Groupe de Puteaux, and it was through these contacts that he secured the principle loans. It was the Association’s ambition to gather together works of art that would help to form a new public taste in art and demonstrate the latest trend in European modernism to a contemporary American audience. Around 1,300 works were displayed, mainly French but also American, English, Irish, German and Swiss.119 Two of the artists whose works had the greatest impact were Orphists, although exhibited as cubists: Picabia and Duchamp, who showed four works each. It was the work that the Salon des Indépendants had rejected, Duchamp’s second Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), that famously became the cause célèbre and cemented his reputation in America. However, the sole representative of the European avantgarde present at the exhibition was Picabia. He quickly got caught up in a stream of interviews, and his contributions, both practical and theoretical, were therefore accorded considerable prominence. Following the Armory Show, Picabia secured a solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s Manhattan 291 gallery (291 Fifth Ave.). This experience of America was ‘one of the most delectable moments of his life’.120 One of the key experiences at this time was his (and his wife’s) first-hand experience of American jazz performers. As is well known, the impact of the Armory Show on American culture was profound and the three artists most often singled out for criticism and incredulity were Matisse, Duchamp and Picabia. In addition to the familiar negative criticism that accrued to the work, there were also critics of considerable sensitivity, for example Charles Caffin, discussing Picabia’s La Procéssion, Séville (1912, Procession Seville): I began to enjoy its rhythms both of form and color. Then I gradually discovered that this pattern of color, which seemed to have been composed solely as a rhythmic

122

Improvision

arrangement of shapes and colors, really involved the suggestion of shrouded figures, carrying candles . . . I begin to understand Picabia’s method. It is the reverse of Matisse. While the motive is abstract expression, the latter’s method involves a simplification that strips away as much as possible of the details of objective appearance. Picabia, on the other hand, emulating the musicians as he manipulates the notes of the octave, starts with a few forms, colored according to the key of the impression he wishes to create and combines and recombines these in a variety of relations until he has produced a harmonic composition in which one discovers that the theme of his subject has been built. In a word, he does not proceed from the concrete to the abstraction, but from abstraction to a spiritual impression of the concrete.121

In order to elucidate these ‘European Moderns’ (to use Davis’s term from the preface of the Armory Show catalogue), Picabia resorted to the same analogy. He was reported as saying, ‘Art resembles music . . . in some important respects. To a musician the words are obstacles to musical expression, just as objects are obstacles to pure art expression.’122 These are ideas that greatly resonate with Apollinaire’s opinions. Again, the analogy with music is invoked in order to bypass language. One final (anonymous) critic joined the analogy: ‘If their [Picasso and Picabia] work is music it is programme music, and the programme plays an important part in their conception.’123 This was due, according to the anonymous critic, to the prominence of titles that ‘explain’ the works. Picabia’s answer to this mild criticism, of a tension between text and image, was a series of sixteen watercolours exhibited at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery. These works push hard at the relationship between depicted content and descriptive title. There are six with the generic title ‘New York’, that might be thought of as abstracted architectural shapes, elements of traffic and dislocated human forms, but like the titles in programme music (as mentioned by the American critic) the relationship between lexis and opsis here is suggestive rather than simply descriptive – the words do not map directly to the elements of the image, they operate instead to provoke and suggest. In addition to these six city images there are two that directly take up the analogy used by Picabia and critics to ‘explain’ abstraction. The two images of music (jazz) are entitled Chanson nègre I (Figure 3.2) and Chanson nègre II (Figure 3.3). At the time of their first exhibition, one anonymous reviewer went so far as to claim to have detected a ‘dressed chicken standing on its head’.124 Irrespective of the presence of a possible upside down gallus, the images may provoke interpretation, but they deliberately do not supply enough detail to satisfy it. This is even true of those interpretations like Picabia’s friend the sculptor Jo Davidson’s, who incorrectly titles these watercolours ‘Danse Nègre’. He claimed to detect in the image a buck and wing (a fast tap or clog dance) and compared Picabia’s abstract colour choices on this theme, rather anachronistically, to later German romantic music, rather than jazz; ‘He interprets the clog dance in colour exactly as Richard Strauss, would in music. And anyone with half an eye can see what he means.’125 The irony is perhaps pushed by Davidson to promote the level of abstraction and move its serious intent away from too close an association with what he disparagingly regards as the popular. Another reviewer regards these two watercolours as explained by reference to the specific elements of the ‘variety show’,

Orphism and a New Tune II

123

Figure 3.2 Francis Picabia Chanson nègre I (Negro Song I), 1913, watercolour and graphite on paperboard, 66.4 × 55.9 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

claiming that they relate directly to the activities of a specific event that, it is claimed, Picabia witnessed when he heard a jazz singer.126 One critic, Samuel Swift, also took up the Strauss image, and in a wonderfully mixed-up attempt at decipherment explained the composition as: ‘a symphony, or perhaps a folk song, in whites and browns and purples’. The use of purple is further elaborated in a sweeping generalization in the same article: ‘Picabia did not know, it seems, that purple was a favourite color of most negros, but as he has told Mr Stieglitz, who afterward conveyed this fact to him, purple was the inevitable and dominating hue that sprang to the Frenchman’s consciousness when he heard the song of the darky.’127 The New York Herald critic who saw the inverted chicken was the only one to mention jazz or ragtime explicitly: ‘the masses of color . . . suggest pride, self-assertion and ragtime melody’.128 The analogue of music as a filter for thinking of abstraction is compelling and jazz brought the modern, the machine (through rhythm) and the abstract into close proximity.

124

Improvision

Figure 3.3 Francis Picabia Chanson nègre II Negro Song II , 1913, watercolour and graphite on illustration board, 55.6 × 65.7 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

Both watercolours have their titles written within the picture frame, in the top left corner, and signed towards the bottom left. In addition, they both have the same tonality: black, white, grey, brown and a ‘purple’ that is closer to maroon. Through his discussions with Buffet and his contact with the Puteaux group, his pictorial language became increasingly more cubist with a greater moulding of pictorial space and the integration of abstracted objects within this fictive space. His works of this period develop a complex dialogue between nature, in terms of external subject matter, and a freedom of imagination and invention. The presence of the titles within the frame, discussed below, becomes a dominant feature of his works from this point on for a number of years. The final two watercolors in the series exhibited at 291 are explicitly on the subject of dance. They are entitled Danseuse étoile et son école de danse and Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique. The subjects of this complete series are, therefore, the city, jazz-song and human movement. The dancer and early film star Stacia Napierkowska was known to Picabia first-hand when he had met her on board the La Lorraine, en route for New York during the twelve-day journey (hence the title of the second dance work). The collective ambition of these watercolours (produced in New York) can be summarized as a concern

Orphism and a New Tune II

125

with the phenomenological engagement of the observer in relation to movement and energy and their environment. They are an attempt to develop an artistic language (a visual architecture) that might communicate emotion and sensation more directly than through mimetic representation. For this, the analogue of music was entirely appropriate; in theory, with the intellectual support of Buffet, and in practice, through the first-hand experience of the energy and verve of New York jazz clubs. But unlike Delaunay, Kupka and Léger, as Virginia Spate has pointed out, both Picabia and Duchamp ‘operated in an emotional sphere quite different . . . for their irony, their pessimism, their concern for the delicate movements of inner life, were in fundamental opposition to the others’ optimistic delight in the world of sensation’.129 For this the site of New York was important. The significance of America and specifically the impact of the Armory Show, provided them both, as opposed to the other Orphists, with an environment that was both conducive, receptive, supportive and saturated with the buzz and rhythm of modernity. In this, Gabrielle Buffet is a key intellectual arbiter, and her articulation of these various polyphonic currents was of great significance, all the more so away from the old-world constrictions of Paris.

Gabrielle Buffet Buffet and Picabia first met in 1908 when she was twenty-seven, they married a year later in January 1909.130 The conversations between them and Apollinaire forged a theory of expression that functioned as a key element in the conceptual backbone of Orphism. As a sophisticated musician, Buffet provided an expert counterpoint to the sometimes rather amorphous invocations of the musical in relation to painting and visual art more generally. She wrote of their visit to New York, ‘we were from the time of our arrival, incorporated into a heteroclite and international group in which night was made day, where conscientious objectors of all kinds and all nationalities kept close in an unimaginable outburst of sexuality, jazz and alcohol’.131 Courted by the American press and speaking on behalf of Picabia (whose English reportedly consisted of only two words, ‘railroad’ and ‘Broadway’), she helped explain abstraction to an American audience. I quoted above a text she wrote, first as a lecture, in which she uses music as a way of thinking of meaning in visual abstraction, and during which she down-plays the titles of Picabia’s works. She does this to emphasize the formal qualities of the works as values in themselves, but titles were significant to both Picabia and Duchamp, a significance that was amplified by their relationship with Apollinaire, and this was true before the development of a so-called ‘mechanical aesthetic’. For example, his series of New York watercolours are not simply entitled ‘city’, ‘music’ or ‘dance’, but ‘New York’, ‘Negro Song’, ‘Star Dancer and Her School of Dance’ and ‘Star Dancer on a Transatlantic’ [Cruise/Ship]. The point is precisely the tension between the subject and the mode of depiction, between two different registers of signification (general and specific), and music as a theoretical model adds a third. The nature of modern art is, according to Buffet, a consequence of a new world view dependant on new scientific discoveries. These offer ‘a new and complex state of mind to which the external world appears more clearly in the abstract form of the qualities

126

Improvision

and properties of its elements than under the concrete form of our sense perceptions’. She goes on, ‘In order that art should express the complexity of this new state of mind, it has to create new elements.’132 External appearance was challenged by X-rays and microscopic technologies, atomic theory and notions of the fourth-dimension. In addition to this the psychological was also, she contested, a guiding principle for art. She sketches a history of art where photography liberated painting from the aspiration to follow Renasissance perspective, and now art is free to express the vision of the artists as abstractly as a musician. In the catalogue of the exhibition of Picabia’s watercolours, which was also reprinted in a contemporary magazine achieving wider circulation, Picabia’s own explanation of his aims reverberates with his earlier Synthetist ideas and his experiences of jazz: The [studies] express the spirit of New York as I feel it . . . I absorb these impressions. I am in no hurry to put them on canvas. I let them remain in my brain, and then when the spirit of creation is at flood-tide, I improvise my pictures as a musician improvises music. [emphasis added]133

Like a jazz musician, Picabia filters his imaginative invention through a process of cogitation and processing to allow it to emerge in real-time composition. While the American press were excited by the possibility that Picabia ‘for the first time in his life – heard and saw an American Negro sing a “Coon Song” ’,134 it is more than likely that this was not the first time Picabia had been exposed to African-American music (as we have seen, rag and early jazz were in Paris well before 1913). However, the intensity of the experience in situ, in the multisensory whirlwind of a New York music venue, may well have imprinted itself ‘in his brain’ more forcibly. As the perceptive critic of the Armoury Show, Charles Caffin, an English-born writer in the Stieglitz circle, noted in relation to Picabia’s large paintings, what is significant here is not so much the subject, as the way the depiction of the subject is consequent on the technique used – in this case, improvisation.135 Much more needs, and will, be said about improvisation, but it is important to register at this juncture that improvisation chimes with Picabia’s stated ambition (even as early as 1908), to create a new art which would contain ‘forms and colours freed from their sensorial attributes’ that would be ‘situated in pure invention which recreates the world according to its own desires and its own imagination’136 even if this non-mimetic aspiration was extremely difficult to realize in practice at that time. Picabia was more positive about the direction of travel, improvising with simplified forms in the hope that they could be composed to evoke emotion without having to describe a specific physical reality. Caffin saw this clearly in Picabia’s New York watercolours. ‘The forms no longer suggest even remotely the visibilities. The varishaped and vari-coloured parts of the composition unite to reproduce the mingled sensation of order, confusion, rapidly changing motion, power and bigness. The forms, thus associated with one another, are purely symbols of abstractions.’137 The essential idea with which Picabia operated is one shared with Apollinaire (as expressed in Les Peintres Cubistes), which is that the meaning of this emergent abstract art lies in the physical reality of the painting and not in its resemblance to something outside the frame. He had earlier, yet again, invoked music as an analogy for this aspiration. In

Orphism and a New Tune II

127

relation to the representation of a landscape, he said a musician ‘expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of an impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of colour and form.’138 What is being sought is not resemblance, but mood or atmosphere, and memory and the process of impression filtered through improvisation are better mechanisms for this. During his time in New York the analogy between music and painting came up time and time again. The experience of jazz served to energize the analogy in relation to the buzz of modernity as it pulsed through New York.

Gleizes When Albert Gleizes and his wife Juliette Roche sailed for New York in September 1915 on their honeymoon, they joined Duchamp but missed Picabia and Buffet by a few weeks. (Duchamp and the Picabias had both, separately, arrived in New York a few months earlier, but Picabia and Buffet had moved on to Cuba.) Gleizes’ experience as a European avant-garde artist visiting America is particularly telling and worth discussion. The Gleizes found New York, in many ways, overwhelming in its contemporaneity. On their very first day they immersed themselves in its particular brand of modernity, strolling down Broadway, and at dinner that evening they experienced their first live jazz music. Duchamp gave a dinner party for them on their second night in New York at the Brevoort Hotel (where Picabia and Buffet had stayed). At dinner they were introduced to, among others, Man Ray, Joseph Stella, Alfred Stieglitz, the Arnsbergs, and the ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis (author of, a few years later, Negro Folksongs (1918),139 and her husband, the painter Paul Burlin, who had also exhibited at the Amory Show. Curtis had been one of the major sponsors of the first concert of black musicians at Carnegie Hall, when on 2 May 1912 the Clef Club orchestra, conducted by James Reese Europe, performed there. In this way, Gleizes and his wife were immediately thrust into first-hand contact with contemporary American popular music and visual art. That such modernity required a critical artistic language was self-evident to him, and that which most obviously presented itself to Gleizes was a development of cubism. He had written with his colleague Jean Metzinger, in their influential text Du Cubisme just a couple of years earlier in 1912: Formerly the fresco incited the artist to present distinct objects which evoked a simple rhythm, and on which the light bloomed, serving a synchronic vision rendered necessary by the amplitude of the surfaces; today oil painting allows us to express supposedly inexpressible notions of depth, density, and duration, and encourages us to present, according to complex rhythms, a veritable fusion of objects with a restricted space.140

A new complex rhythm, and a simultaneous vision rather than synchronic and simple rhythm. His wife, however, claimed, ‘I shall never be a Cubist, though, of course, that art interests me a great deal, even my husband cannot influence me there’, but, she went on, ‘Cubist art is a definite reflection of the life we lead these days. Cubist art tries to see all

128

Improvision

the aspects concentrated: we in our living are trying to get all viewpoints and visions, and perhaps our lives are as unintelligible as a Cubist picture is to some people.’141 Cubism’s suitability was due to its polyphonic nature, but also the space it provided for individual emphasis. It was not a scientific exploration of the representation of space and time, rather it is intuitive, personal; as with a jazz musician, knowledge informs, but personality and individuality are also key and need to be part of the vision: Geometry is a science, painting is an art. The geometer measures, the painter savours. The absolute of the one is necessarily the relative of the other; if logic is alarmed at this so much the worse! Will it ever prevent a wine from being different in the retort of the chemist and in the glass of the drinker? We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for this too literal comprehension of Cubist theory, and his faith in absolute truth, by arduously juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile. . . . We seek the essential, but we seek it in our personality and not in a sort of eternity, laboriously fitted out by mathematicians and philosophers . . . As many images of the object as eyes to contemplate it, as many images of essence as minds to understand it.142

Gleizes is often regarded as a systematic painter, although he also emphasizes the importance of something much less effable; the idea of an artistic spirit with intuitive knowledge that guides the artist, rather in the way Picabia had emphasized the role of improvisation. Painting non-mimetically, then, was not simply an issue of composition, of conscious control and organization, it was also about the ‘feel’ and, as such, was more phenomenological, more experiential, enacted between artist and canvas: We are in an age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, action, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallized the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilised in his picture. The painting of today must crystallize a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system; it surprises through the unforeseen and is re-newed by it. We should regard ‘the system’ with suspicion. It limits our possibilities. How, for example, can we give the equivalent of the enormous ‘Broadway’ – that fantastic river with a thousand currents going against each other, interweaving, rising up over its banks – if, in our painter’s expression, we apply little principles just about good enough to describe a very simple object, an inkstand, a box etc. With one blow, the truth blinds us [crève les yeux] and rises up to scatter the system’s charm.143

The experience of Broadway was too synaesthetic to be contained within an art that did not aspire to engage the sounds as well as the sights of New York. The impact of these sounds was just as powerful as its sights, it flooded the body not just the eyes.

Orphism and a New Tune II

129

Daniel Robbins reported on Gleizes and his wife’s trip to a jazz club: “On stage was a black jazz group who played and sang with such force – indeed, ferocity – that the French couple felt they had heard something newer and more sensational than the music of Stravinsky.’144 At this time, 1915, ‘After a lull of almost a decade, AfricanAmerican musicians and dancers were making an impact downtown on Broadway and luring white audiences to Harlem.’145 The visceral impact of live performance was especially important for jazz, as it was rewriting the rules of performance, not just in terms of musical form, through melodic, rhythmic and harmonic improvization, but also in terms of performance etiquette, as we saw reported in Ansermet’s essay; ‘it seems as if a great wind is passing over a forest or as if a door is suddenly opened on a wild orgy’.146 Gleizes was impressed by the live performance of such music and later remarked on the fluidity of jazz performers, who, ‘without stopping their music, could pass from the platform and into the crowded area of tables’. Thus, they transgressed the ‘fourth-wall’, and moved music from the performance space to the space of the spectator, to integrate it directly into life, Gleizes regarded this dynamic, shared experience as ‘symbolic of the new age’.147 In addition, Robbins writes, ‘they had never seen [musical instruments] treated almost as living extensions of the body . . . The performance, performers and audience were blended into a new entity.’148 This is music that literally moves, that transgresses, that is truly Orphic.

Gleizes’s jazz paintings In 1915 Gleizes painted a series of four related works on the theme of ‘jazz’ featuring banjo players. The two largest and most worked up are Composition pour Jazz (Figure 3.4) (610 in the Catalogue raisonné, New York, Guggenheim149) and Banjo ou Le Jazz (611, current location unknown). In addition, there are two preliminary sketches for Composition, both of near identical design, very closely related to the final painting. Composition and Banjo, while both composed around the shape of the banjo, are opposite in tonality, the former light, and predominantly white, yellow, red and black in hue, the latter mainly dark, and black, ochre, grey and brown. They are both analytical cubist portraits, three-quarter length, of banjo players showing a player picking the strings with their right hand, with the fret board to the right in Composition, and split almost vertically and leaning slightly back in Banjo. The peg board is also visible in the sketches and Composition, with the strings shown in the doubled, slightly larger white disk of the sounding head, and inclined in the opposite direction (angled to the left). Both appear to be four-string banjos, possibly tenor or melody banjos; although with all cubist representations of instruments the number of strings is not significant, as the marks aim to signify strings rather than to represent them mimetically. In Composition, for example, the four picking fingers of the right-hand act to rhyme the four playing strings. In the background of Banjo there is the suggestion of a second performer playing the piano at top left, looking down to the right, with a keyboard just below a possible raised left hand. In both cases the performers are dressed in what are probably tails, with white shirt and waistcoat. This is especially visible in Banjo. The physiognomy of the figure(s) in Banjo conform to the same racist caricature as popular

130

Improvision

Figure 3.4 Albert Gleizes, Composition pour Jazz, 1915, gouache on cardboard on Masonite, 73 × 73 cm, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

imagery, collapsing into hieroglyphic stereotyping which is not apparent in Composition and the sketches. The fragmentation, axial displacement, and rhyming and repetition of forms are a visual analogue to the rhythmical, gestural excitement of the live performance of the music. The word jazz, as we saw in the first chapter, had only recently (in 1915) been coined, but such images as Gleizes’ are representative of the type musicians found in the ‘syncopated orchestras’ performing in New York at the time (for example, James Europe’s Clef Club), the banjo player providing what Europe himself referred to as ‘the “thrum-thrum” effect, and the eccentric, accentuated beat, so desirable in dance music’.150 These images were followed the same year by others of the generic city of New York and the specific Broadway district, which collectively attempted to capture something of the synaesthesia Gleizes had experienced in this modernist metropolis.151 Cubism provided him with an appropriate syntax for evoking sound and movement as well as sites through sight.

Orphism and a New Tune II

131

After the initial excitement of New York, however, the Gleizes’ enthusiasm for the frantic pace of modern city life began to wane. By the winter of 1916, although his canvases through 1917 still gave no suspicion that he was not thrilled with the modern visions of America, he turned against the commercialism he saw all around him and began to miss more intimate contact with nature and the countryside. Robbins points out that much of the driving force against New York may have come from Juliette. They returned to France after the war, in 1919.

Picabia rendre Paris When Picabia first returned from New York in May 1913 he set about producing a couple of paintings that amplified his achievements in New York and developed the vocabulary of the jazz watercolours. One of the most significant things about the two large paintings he produced was their names, as we shall see: Udnie; jeune fille américaine (danse) and Edtaonisl (ecclésiastique). Together they form a diptych, both the same size, just under 10 feet square (300 × 300 cm) and containing a similar disposition of colours and abstract shapes. He explained they were ‘memories of America . . . which subtly oppose like musical harmonies, become representative of an idea, of a nostalgia, of a fugitive impression’.152 The aspiration to musicalist art goes beyond the idea of harmonies. The conception of opposition and the temporal quality of impression is readily adapted from the experience of music, and the composition of Edtaonisl is especially close to that of Negro Song II . Both have a sense of movement, which swells up from bottom left to top right, both use the same vocabulary of signs and shapes. Udnie and Negro Song I also have compositional similarities. In Udnie there is more concentration in the central part of the image (see Figure 3.5) with an inverted ‘u’ shape that resolves in the bottom right section in a similar way in both. However, despite the same vocabulary, the two larger paintings represent a much more sophisticated development of the syntax. There is less sense of gravitational resolution in the oils than in the watercolours, the latter maintain a greater sense of figure–ground relation. In the oils Picabia has developed a more consistently ambiguous pictorial space. Spate explains this in relation to the painting process: ‘He obtained these ambiguous effects by working directly on the canvas, improvising on linear structure as he had done in the New York paintings, but achieving richer complexities through the use of oil paint.’ She goes on to describe this in more detail in relation to Udnie: Examination of the surface of Udnie shows that Picabia drew in the small detailed forms, and then ‘filled in’ these areas, but that he also did a considerable amount of overpainting – particularly with beautifully modulated ‘shading’ and with light-filled transparent planes – so that he made the structure even more dense and ambiguous, for as he painted he gave alternative readings to every successive illusion of depth, space, movement, or volume in such a way that one cannot look at a single element without it turning into something else before one’s eyes.153

132

Improvision

Figure 3.5 Francis Picabia, Udnie; jeune fille américaine (danse) [Udnie (Young American Girl, The Dance)], 1913, oil on canvas, 290 × 300 cm, inspired by the bacchanalian dances of Stacia Napierkowska. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Photo (C) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Georges Meguerditchian.

This process of painting is radically different from painting based on any set of mimetic principles. The improvised nature of composition is fundamental, the ambiguity that Spate explains is arrived at in the making, it is not made beforehand, the overpainting represents variations on a ground (literally), moves away from the ‘given’ in the performance of painting. Picabia’s improvisations developed, according to Spate, in two stages: he first drew a linear structure – perhaps thinking about the dancer, about New York, or the black singing – but without using the lines to suggest particular groupings . . . He then improvised from this linear structure, either affirming it by filling in the areas bounded by line, or breaking it down by continuing a colour over a boundary, by overpainting earlier shapes, or by fading one plane into the next, but always taking care that the abstract linear substructure remained visible.154

Orphism and a New Tune II

133

It would take little substitution of terms to use this description in relation to jazz improvisation, instead of abstract painting: ‘artists may “run” the figure directly “into itself ”, perhaps through a slight extension or short connecting pattern, treating the figure as a component within a longer phrase. Or they may answer the idea by rephrasing it an octave lower, or re-create its shape at multiple pitch levels, creating sequences’ etc.155 The sense of overall movement in Picabia’s painting would be more stilled and stilted (it would not ‘swing’), if it was merely a matter of transcribing the studies. This is why the New York watercolours should not be thought of as sketches for the two paintings. Rather in the same way a jazz musician develops their vocabulary of licks and phrases that can be modulated in different ways in different contexts, so Picabia honed a series of shapes and signs in the more fluid language of watercolour, which he then came to work up in oil in a more complex and involved improvisation, on a much larger scale: he refered to it as ‘a rhythm of impulse’.156 Picabia said of these two paintings: Udnie is no more the portrait of a young girl than Edtaonisl is the image of a priest, such as we normally conceive of them. They are memories [souvenirs] of America, evocations of it, subtly arranged in the manner of a musical composition; they represent an idea, a nostalgia, of a fleeting impression.157

Gabrielle Buffet reported that he painted these works ‘with unimaginable speed and fever. He worked day and night without eating.’ She also explained that Udnie, jeune fille américaine (danse) was a ‘memory’ of seeing Stacia Napierkowska (Figure  3.6). This would relate it directly to the earlier work Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique (Star Dancer on a Transatlantic Cruise) (1913), one of the New York watercolours. Napierkowska was a French actress and dancer who, although trained in ballet, became known for more ‘exotic’ dances (she had performed on the stage of the Folies Bergères). She was also prominent as an actress, appearing in such films as Cleopatra and Le festin Balthazar (both 1910) and later Les Vampires (1916) and L’Antlatide (1922). She was also often to be found in magazines, such as Fermes et Chateaux (1912), Le Journal Amusant (1913), and Femina (1913). In addition, she was the face of many advertisements before 1915. It is therefore unlikely that Picabia saw her for the first time when she was on board La Lorraine. She was en route to America to tour with her ballet ‘Arabian pantomine’. If she did, in fact, dance aboard the Lorraine and it was witnessed by the Picabias, it may well have been a ‘ragtime’ dance (as Jody Blake suggests158), or it may have been the ‘dance of the bee’, which she later performed in New York, and for which she was brought before a magistrate on a charge of indecency.159 Whatever it was, Buffet reported it was the memory of Napierkowska dancing, and of Picabia witnessing her being watched by a Dominican priest who was also aboard, which formed the unusual stimulus for the painting. The important issue is that the painting represents memories of movement recomposed in pictorial space. But its relationship to image is also more complicated and is tied up in abstraction’s complex relationship to new technologies, in ways analogous to jazz’s relationship to recording and gramophones. Picabia’s painting is more than just a recollection made manifest, the idea of Napierkowska’s ‘image’ is made much more complicated by both its ubiquity (in

134

Improvision

Figure 3.6 Stacia Napierkowska performing one of her dances, 1910. Photo: Washington DC, Library of Congress, public domain.

different media: film, photography, on stage, etc.), its repetition across these media, and by its tangible and intangible aspect. While she was ‘everywhere’ as image, she was also present (in the flesh) on the boat, and this quality of representation was unique to modernity and mechanical reproduction. At the same time as being present in Picabia’s memory she is also absent from the painting (although implied in the title). This character of being present and not present was a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century and was consequent on new forms of reproduction technology. The ability for a ‘star’ image to be manifold and simultaneously present, to be known and not known, and to be manipulable was something the critic Walter Benjamin wrote about in 1935. In the opening of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin quotes Paul Valéry: ‘In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.’160 Benjamin discusses the film actor in section VIII of his essay and explores the nature of their presence to the camera, which produces an image for the audience that is quite different from the experience of stage acting. He sees this technology as shifting from the aura of live performance to the production of the ‘spell of the personality’ in relation to the commodification of the actor within the film industry.161 Napierkowska represents an early case of such an ‘image’, a complex one that is essentially modern and which attracted Picabia’s attention as a subject for abstraction in painting. These two paintings by Picabia, in turn, represent a challenge to the idea of reproduction and figuration that is part of the modern condition. Improvisation is a

Orphism and a New Tune II

135

Figure 3.7 Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (ecclésiastique), 1913, oil on canvas, 118 × 118 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

key concept in the production of these works of art. Picabia (and other early abstract artists) struggled to develop a vocabulary that might resist the gravity of figuration, both metaphorically, but also in terms of the utilization of pictorial space as pictorial space, rather than as ‘fictive’ illusionistic space. The disposition of forms in Udnie and Edtaonisl (see Figure 3.7) resist the weight, fall, gravity and attraction to a ground that is synonymous with the bottom or base of the canvas, and instead float or drift through a median zone. While the works may have been based on memories and some hidden figurative origins, in the process of painting and the improvisation of mark-making, Picabia became solely engaged in the formal conversation between marks and gestural expression. In doing this Picabia became absorbed in the process, or performance, in the act of painting (not stopping, or eating as Buffet recalled). The physical paintings are what he later called ‘an object living by itself and with its own expression’.162 This independence of identity is supported by the naming of the paintings. The seeming nonsense words are constructed to emphasize the independence and autonomy of the painting qua object: ‘an object living by itself ’. In relation to the naming of these works he explained to Stieglitz in a letter of June 1913, ‘I am thinking

136

Improvision

moreover of a purer painting, painting with one dimension no longer having a title, each painting will have a name related to its pictorial expression, [an] appropriate name created absolutely for it.’163 We are reminded of Apollinaire’s and Duchamp’s word games, but here the process is different. The mechanism by which he did this was to thread words together, to integrate words by inserting alternating letters, so the painting of ‘une dimension’ becomes ‘udnie’ and ‘etoile danseuse’ (prima ballerina) becomes ‘edtaonisl’. The deconstruction involved in this process shifts the role of the title away from signification to sound; the title moves from lexis to melos. Of course, Picabia had used inscriptions as titles since 1912 (in Figure triste, Tarentelle and La Procession, Séville exhibited at the Amory Show, for example). With the two post-New York canvases, such titles take on a more creative and sonic ambition. The role of titles was rarely just descriptive of the subject, as Apollinaire had pointed out in Les Peintres Cubiste: ‘Let us add that, for Picabia, the act of giving the work a name is not an intellectual element apart from the art to which he has devoted himself ’, this was all, according to Apollinaire, to avoid becoming a literary painter, but instead to give the works ‘a personal existence. (Let us note that the act of giving a title does not mean that the artist is taking on a subject.)’164 This approach is consistent with the aesthetics of cubism, which incorporated text as visual material within the syntax of both hermetic and synthetic works. This ‘naming’ can be contrasted with Kandinky’s concomitant approach to titles in his abstract works. He too wanted them to stand as independent objects, but he went about this (as Jackson Pollock did) by giving them non-names, such as Composition, Impression and significantly, Improvisation. We have seen with Gleizes that cubism allowed him to approach the idea of synaesthesia more fully. Picabia’s painting developed, on the other hand, to become much more ‘classical’, sharp edged and mechanical. In conception this move represents a shift to a more ironic form of address, one that maintains a tension between text and image. Of course, Duchamp too turned to the machine, but in both cases this is also an engagement with abstraction, which we shall discuss in the next chapter.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Ibid, reprinted Routledge, 2002, p. 31. See S. Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar The Visual in Music (London: Routledge, 2016) for a critique of this idea. For more on this see H.K. Pinson, The Jazz Image: seeing music through Herman Leonard’s photography (University of Mississippi Press, 2010). M. Antliff and P. Leighten, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago University Press, 2008) p. 75. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. A. Harrison (New York: Crowell Co., 1902), vol. 17, p. 22, quoted after H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969, reprint 1974), p. 122.

Orphism and a New Tune II 7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

137

G. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris, 1913), trans. L. Abelas The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, ed. R. Motherwell (New York, 1949), p. 17. See also Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, pp. 477–523. Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 482. The quote from Nietzsche comes from Twilight of the Idols. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (or how to philosophize with a Hammer), trans. R. Polt (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publications, 1997, first published 1889), p. 62. Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 482. See ‘Apollinaire et ‘Les Peintres Cubistes’, La Revue des Lettres Modernes nos. 104–7 (1964), p. 100. Also L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (revised edition MIT Press, 2013), p. 183. Quoted after J. Golding, Cubism: A History and Anaysis 1907–1914 (3rd edn. Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 51. L. B. Brown, D. Goldblatt and T. Gracyk in Jazz and the Philosophy of Art Routledge, 2018 relate Nietzsche’s Dionysian views to turn of the century New Orleans and the practice of scat, especially to ‘contrast the Dionysian spirit of the Jazz Age with what we know of the actual rituals that preserved African celebration in nineteenth-century New Orleans’ (Part II, sec. 2). I want to pursue a different line. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. S. Whiteside, ed. M. Tanner (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 115. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music p. 117. Ibid. Ibid, p. 33. G. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes: Méditations esthétiques, reprinted and translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 480. Ibid, pp. 480–81. See my Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002), p. 140. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 482. Ibid, p. 511. P. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York, 1971), p. 37. Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 509. Ibid, p. 511. See ‘La Couleur et les formes’ (extracts from a lecture given at his exhibition at the Galerie La Boëtie), Montjoie, Nov.–Dec. 1913, p. 14. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 486. Philostratus, Imagines and Callistratus, Descriptions, trans A. Fairbanks (London, and New York, 1931), Philostratus the Younger’s ‘Orpheus’, p. 311. See, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. M. Gagarin and E. Fantham, vol. 1 (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2010), pp. 199–200. K. Higgins, ‘Neitzsche on Music’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (vol. 47, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1986), pp. 663–72, esp. p. 667. Ibid, p. 668. M. E. Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 22. H. T. Fink, ‘Music and Morals’ in Chopin and Other Essays (New York, 1910), pp. 143–82. Leo Oehmler, ‘Ragtime: A Pernicious Evil and Enemy of True Art’, Musical Observer, XI, September 1914, p. 15. See P. Whiteman and M. M. McBride, Jazz (New York: Sears, 1926), pp. 137–8.

138

Improvision

36 ‘Jazz and its Victims’, The New York Times, 7 October 1928, sec. V, p. 19. 37 André Suarès, quoted after C. Goddard, Jazz Away from Home (New York: Paddington, 1979), p. 138. 38 M. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), p. 130. 39 Some commentators even made the absurd point that, ‘Is jazz a new kind of music? . . . almost all pieces of so-called Jazz music, when striped of their instrumentation . . . have nothing new to offer’ (H. F. Gilbert in R. Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, (Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 45). Despite the fact that this is true of most music it misunderstands the central issue of ‘voice’ or timbre – as Finkelstein has put it ‘the instrumentation of a music . . . is as much a part of the composer’s [or performer’s we might add] thinking as its melodies’ (ibid. p. 142). 40 See for example M. E. Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton University Press, 2006). 41 Quoted in R. Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44. This and n. 39 are part of a series of responses by an invited group of musicians (and prominent public men) to the question ‘where is Jazz leading America’ as asked and published in a special edition of The Etude in August 1924. 42 T. Atkins, Jazz Planet (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. xiv. 43 The term ‘simultanism’ is derived from the theories of Michel Eugène Chevreuil, whose book of colour theory De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839. Chevreuil promoted an understanding of colour as a comparative phenomenon and the fact that contrasting colours brought together (simultaneous) enhance and amplify each other. 44 R. Delaunay, Du Cubime à l’art abstrait (Paris, 1957) ed. F. Francastle with list of works and exhibitions by G. Habasque, pp. 146–7, emphasis Delaunay’s. 45 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans F. L. Pogson, 1889 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 100. 46 Ibid. 47 Oil on canvas, 34 × 89 cm, held in the Philadelphia Museum, US. 48 See V. Spate, Orphism: The evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 199–200. 49 Oil on canvas, 52 × 207 cm, Folkwang Museum, Essen. 50 Quoted after M. Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press, reprint 2003), p. 9. 51 In 1898 Eugene Ducretet sent a Morse signal from the Eiffel Tower to the Pantheon. See also John L. Hogan Jr., ‘Radio-telegraphy at the Eiffel Tower’ in Scientific American, vol. 111, no. 16 (17 October 1914), pp. 321, 325–6. 52 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, p. 18. 53 Ibid, p. 11. See P. Bergman, ‘Modernolatria’ et ‘Simulaneita’: Recherches sur deux tendances dans l’avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la premiere guerre mondiale (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1962), p. 315. 54 He was known as Charles and nicknamed Charlot, maybe in honour of Chaplin, whose films were first shown in France the year after his birth, and by which time there were almost 200 cinemas in the country. 55 Quoted after M. Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 78. 56 See C. Delaunay, ‘Jazz and World Culture’ reprinted in International Journal of Music Education (1 May 1983), pp. 41–5.

Orphism and a New Tune II

139

57 See C. Delaunay, Delaunay’s Dilemma: de la peinture au Jazz (Paris: Editions W, 1985). It takes its title from a piece by the jazz musician John Lewis which was composed by him in honour of Charles. 58 In addition to other things he was the author of the standard directory of recorded jazz, The New Hot Discography (New York: Criterion, 1948), a work that ‘lists nearly all discovered recordings, together with recording dates and master numbers’ (p. x). Its aim was to provide ‘a fascinating account of the evolution of an art form’ (p. ix). 59 Quoted after Dregni, Django, p. 77. 60 C. Delaunay, The New Hot Discography (1948), p. ix. 61 M. Dregni, Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 57. 62 The quintet consisted, in addition to Django and Stéphane, of Django’s brother Joseph and Roger Chaput on rhythm guitars and Louis Vola on bass. 63 Ibid, p. 5. 64 See C. Delaunay, Delaunay’s Dilemma: de la peinture au Jazz, (quoted after Dregni, Gypsy Jazz, p. 79). 65 G. Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini, trans J. Franchina (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 53. 66 For more on this see Gino Severini, ‘The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism’ in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2001), p. 125. 67 J. Gage, ‘Severini’s Socks or the Dancing Colours’ in Gino Severini. The Dance 1909– 1916, exhibition catalogue, ed. Daniela Fonti (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A., 2001), pp. 34–5. 68 G. Severini, ‘Plastic Analogies of Dynamism: Futurist Manifesto’ (October 1913) in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (Yale, 2009), p. 168. 69 M. Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and other scandalous dances: outrage at couple dancing in the 19th and early 20th centuries (London: McFarland, 2009), esp. ch. 9, pp. 91–102. 70 Ibid, pp. 97–99. 71 Quoted after C. Arscott and K. Scott, Manifestations of Venus (Manchester Universty Press, 2000) p. 131. 72 Sonia Delaunay, Le Bal Bullier, 1912–13. Oil on canvas, 50.2 × 73 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. Reproduction of this painting was not possible, despite numerous requests, email and letters which went unanswered. 73 See R. Bordier, ‘Sonia Delaunay ou de la couleur avant toute chose’, Art d’aujourd’hui, September 1954, p. 12. 74 M. E. Chevreuil, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their Application to the Arts, trans C. Martel, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1855), p. 7. 75 S. Delaunay, with J. Damase and P. Raynaud, Nous irons jusqu’au soleil (Paris, 1978), p. 43. 76 R. Delaunay, letter to Auguste Macke, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, p. 186, quoted after Spate, Orphism (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 211–12. 77 P. A. Genova, ‘The Poetics of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire on Pablo Picasso’, in Studies in 20th Century Literature, vol. 27, no. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 49–76, at p. 64. 78 ‘The First Steps’ is also the name of a painting by Kupka in which he eliminated illusionistic lighting and linear perspective for the first time (Le Premier Pas, c. 1909, New York, Museum of Mordern Art, 81 × 127 cm). 79 R. Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 67 (written in 1939), quoted after Spate, Orphism (Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 61. 80 See S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (London, 1983).

140 81 82 83 84 85

Improvision See S. Mallarmé, Correspondances, ed. H. Mondor and L. J. Austin, 1965, ii, p. 266 and p. 301. Apollinaire, in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, ed. M. Antliff and P. Leighten (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 43–5. Bergson, Creative Evolution (intro. K. Ansell-Pearson) (London: Macmillan, 2007), p. 88. See M. Csikszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). Jeanne Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow: • • • • • •

Intense and focused concentration on the present moment Merging of action and awareness A loss of reflective self-consciousness A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

See J. Nakamura and M. Csikszentmihályi, ‘Flow Theory and Research’, in C. R. Snyder, Erik Wright and S. J. Lopez (eds), Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 195–206. 86 Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans E. I. Pogson (New York: Daver, 2001), p. 166. 87 See Genova, ‘The Poetics of Visual Cubism,’ pp. 49–76. 88 Quoted after Spate, Orphism, p. 227. 89 Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, p. 228. 90 Apollinaire, ‘Die moderne Malerei’, Der Sturm (Berlin, Feb. 1913) reprinted in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 473. 91 Ibid, p. 475. 92 Ibid. 93 Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, ed. LeRoy C. Breunig, trans. S. Suleiman (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 264. 94 Quoted after J. Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (Penn State University Press, 1999), p. 37. 95 Quoted after K. Samaltanos, Apollinaire Catalyst for Primitivism, Picabia and Duchamp (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 3. 96 G. Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 170. 97 See Severini, ‘Plastic Analogies of Dynamism: Futurist Manifesto’ (October 1913) in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (Yale, 2009). 98 Quoted after W. Bohn, Modern Visual Poetry (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 68. 99 Quoted after W. Bohn, ‘Gino Severini and Futurist Ideography: Danzatrice = Mare’ in MLN , vol. 109, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 27–48 at p. 42. 100 He would later return to similar themes in relation to his ‘analogie apparenti’ (apparent analogies), a set of synaesthetic relationships with arbitrary associations of objects with colour as the linking factor. Key subjects here are jazz and dancing, as before. Also, his post-1950s works recapitulate many of these same themes. For more on this see C. Santarelli, ‘From Figuration to Abstraction: Dance in the Paintings of Gino Severini’ in Music in Art XXXIX, 1–2 (2004) pp. 167–80. 101 Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes, in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 478.

Orphism and a New Tune II

141

102 V. Spate, Orphism: The evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 77. 103 Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, p. 511. 104 Kandinsky, Complete Writing on Art, ed. K. Lindsay and P. Vergo (London: Faber), p. 168. 105 L. Roger-Milès, Picabia, preface to exhibition catalogue (Paris: Galerie Haussman, 1907). 106 G. Buffet, Aires abstraites (Geneva, 1957) quoted after Spate, Orphism, p. 281. 107 Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes, p. 509. 108 Busoni’s students were impressively diverse in musical style, such as Percy Grainger, Stefan Wolpe and Edgar Varèse, not to mention his mentoring of Sibelius throughout his life. 109 G. Buffet, Aires abstraites, quoted after Spate, Orphism, p. 282. 110 See illustrations 211 and 212 in Spate, Orphism, pp. 283–4. 111 Ibid, p. 285. 112 G. Buffet [Picabia], ‘Modern Art and the Public’, Camera Work, special issue (New York, June 1913), pp. 10–14, reprinted in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, pp. 555–64. Quotation at p. 558. 113 See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002), esp. ch. 1. 114 J. Suquet, Marcel Duchamp, ou, L’éblouissement de l’éc laboussure/Jean Suquet (Paris, 1998), p. 246. 115 P. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R. Padgett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, originally published 1967), p. 34. 116 Ibid, p. 40. 117 See J. Ashbery, ‘On Raymond Rousel’ in M. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth (Berkeley, 1986), pp. xxiii–xxiv. 118 Quoted after H. B. Chipp (ed.) Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: California University Press, 1968) p. 395. 119 See, https://archive.org/details/catalogueofinter00asso. 120 W. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 41. 121 C. Caffin, ‘The International – Yes – But Matisse and Picabia?’, New York American, 3 March 1913. 122 H. Hapgood, ‘A Paris Painter’, Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York, 20 February 1913, p. 8 (also reprinted in Steiglitz’s magazine Camera Work, no. 42–43). See Camfield, Francis Picabia, p. 47. 123 Anon., ‘History of Modern Art at the International Exhibition Illustrated by Paintings and Sculpture’, New York Times, 23 February 1913, sec. 6, p. 15. 124 Anon., ‘Mr Picabia Paints “Coon Songs” ’ (New York Herald, 18 March 1913), p. 12. 125 Quoted by H. Monroe in ‘Davidson’s Sculpture Proves that Artist Has Ideas’, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 23 March 1913, sec. 8, p. 5. 126 According to the Evening Mail, March 1913, p. 10. 127 S. Swift, ‘New York by Cubist Is Very Confusing’, The Sun (New York, 18 March 1913), p. 9. 128 See n. 49 above. 129 Ibid, p. 278. 130 She was born in Fontainebleau, 21 November 1881 and died in Paris at the age of 104 on 7 December 1985. Her marriage to Picabia lasted from 1909 to 1930, they had four

142

131

132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

140 141 142 143

144

145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

Improvision children. In addition to music she was an active writer, and during the Second World War she was active in the French Resistance. Her diary/account of this time c. 1907–19, titled Aires Abstraites (Collection Les Problèmes De L’Art, Pierre Cailler Éditeur, Genève, with a preface by Jean Arp, 1957). Buffet [Picabia] ‘Modern Art and the Public’, pp. 556–57. F. Picabia, ‘How New York Looks to Me’, The New York American, 30 March 1913, p. 11. Anon., ‘Mr Picabia Paints “Coon Songs” ’, New York Herald, 8 March 1913, p. 12. C. Caffin, How To Study The Modern Painters (London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), ‘postscript’. Buffet and Picabia, Aires abstraites (a collection of their early essays, pub. Geneva, 1957), pp. 24–5. C. Caffin, How To Study The Modern Painters, p. 220. Picabia, ‘A Post-Cubist’s Impression of New York’, New York Tribune, 9 March 1913. Curtis is perhaps best known for The Indian’s Book (1907) a collection of songs and tales from eighteen tribes of native Americans, with transcriptions and illustrations. The work served as the inspiration for Percy Grainger, Kurt Schindler, and for her teacher Busoni’s Indian Fantasy (1915). Busoni also taught Gabrielle Buffet before she met and married Picabia. See A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, ‘Cubism’ in Modern Artists on Modern Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed. R. L. Herbert (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 5. S. Addington, ‘New York Is More Alive and Stimulating Than France Ever Was, Say Two French Painters’, New York Tribune, 9 October 1915, p. 7. See Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, p. 13. Gleizes, ‘Les voyages que je viens de faire en Canada, Acores, Portugal, Espagne . . .’ (unpublished ms), quoted after Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 54–5. Quoted after D. Robbins, The Formation and Maturity of Albert Gleizes: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1881–1920 (Ann Arbor, 1977), p. 199 from Gleizes ‘Souvenirs’. Gleizes had also painted Portrait of Igor Stravinsky in 1914 (New York: Museum of Modern Art). Ibid, p. 199. E. Ansermet, first published as ‘Sur un orchestre nègre’, in La Revue Romande, 15 October 1919, pp. 10–13. Translated. as ‘On the Negro Orchestra’ in D. Albright (ed.), Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 368–73. For more on such technical innovations see G. Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford University Press, 1968). D. Robbins, The Formation and Maturity of Albert Gleizes (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1975), p. 199. Ibid. Albert Gleizes Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Daniel Robbins, P. Georgel and A. Varichon (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’art, 1998). Quoted after R. Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 123. See volume I of Albert Gleizes Catalogue Raisonné, esp. pp. 612–28 and 219–22. Picabia, Le Matin (Paris), 1 December 1913, quoted after Spate, Orphism, p. 324. Spate, Orphism, p. 326. Ibid, pp. 322–23.

Orphism and a New Tune II

143

155 A more or less random example from P. Berliner’s marvellous text, describing some relatively simple improvisatory strategies deployed by soloists; Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 194. 156 Quoted in an article by Henry Tyrell in World Magazine (9 February 1913); reprinted in Borràs, Picabia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 106. 157 Picabia, in ‘Ne riez pas, c;est de la peinture et ça représente une jeune américaine,’ Le Matin (December 1, 1913) 1; reprinted in Picabia, Écrits I, p. 26. 158 See, J. Blake, Le tumulte noir. 159 See The New York Times, 29 March 1913, ‘Napierkowska May Dance: Magistrate Levy Decides He Need Not Stop Dance of the Bee’. The dance involved her being ‘chased by a bee that gets embroiled in her clothing, requiring some of it to be removed (she is reported as having bare legs and back). The magistrate finds that it is to be judged from an ‘artistic standpoint rather than from the possible point of view of the minority, which might lack true artistic perceptions’. 160 Quoted from Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, translated by Ralph Manheim, p. 225 (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1964). 161 See W. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 11. 162 Picabia, 291 (12 February 1916), n.p. 163 Quoted after L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (revised edn. MIT Press, 2013), p. 348. 164 G. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes, p. 509.

4

Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm

Life is a lot like jazz . . . it’s best when you improvise. George Gershwin

Part 1 When Picabia returned to New York for a third time in 1915, he renewed contact with Duchamp and his influential artistic American friends Alfred Stieglitz and Marius de Zayas. Away from the war the Picabias’ also took time to reconnect to the jazz impulse. As Gabrielle Buffet wrote: ‘No sooner had we arrived than we became part of a motley international band which turned night into day, conscientious objectors of all nationalities and walks of life living an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz and alcohol.’1 Despite such hedonism, Picabia and his friend Duchamp’s involvement in Orphism was more than a passing fad, notwithstanding the ready dismissal this relatively short period of work often receives. In both cases they considered the idea of abstraction seriously, and in complex dialogue with other forms of expression, both lexis and melos. In Picabia’s case it might be argued that, rather than abandoning this set of concerns when he turned to ‘realistic’ mechanical drawing, he in fact explored a more sophisticated and complex relationship between what are often seen as diametrically opposed concepts within the etiquette of modernism. Indeed, much the same might be said of Duchamp; a dialogue between abstraction and the ‘retinal’, and between abstraction and the abstract (and its opposite, the figure). Mimesis and abstraction are linked rather than opposed in both artists’ work, and we can see this in part by considering an important painting by Picabia from 1915, with the typically provocative title Music is Like Painting (Figure 4.1).

144

Orphism in America

145

Figure 4.1 Francis Picabia, La Musique est comme la Peinture, (Music is Like Painting) 1916, 122 × 66 cm, ink, gouache and watercolour on board. Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

La Musique est comme la Peinture This large work, four feet by two feet, in watercolour, gouache and ink, is inscribed at the top left: LA MUSiqUE EST COMME LA PEiNTURE , a contemporary French translation of the Latin phrase ut pictura musica, which is itself a transposition of the Horatian ut pictura poesis. As such, I want to suggest that it plays with the very idea of

146

Improvision

the ‘figurative’. It plays with it because, as W. J. T. Mitchel points out, ‘We tend to think . . . that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth.’2 In other words, on such occasions we lose sight of the figurative basis of our judgements and comparisons. Of course, for the visual arts the concept of the figurative is also considered to be opposed to abstraction. Like painting and poetry, or indeed music and painting, such categories are often seen as antithetical, where here we consider them to be different in degree, rather than species. In other words, they are not essentially irreconcilable opposites; they can be made to oppose each other, or they can exist as neighbours or sisters. Either position is arrived at according to the specific critical priorities of an historical and cultural context. In Horace’s Ars Poetica he states (361): Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes, te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes. Haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri, iudicis argutum quae non formidat acumen; haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit. [usually translated as] A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away. This courts the shade, that will wish to be seen in the light, and dreads not the critical insight of the judge. This pleased but once; that, though ten times called for, will always please.3

This is a plea for an equivalence of judgement, but one that employs figurative language to establish its case, although Horace goes no further in discussion of the specific relationship between these ‘sister’ arts. This idea modulated over time to signify a contest between the arts rather than a call for fair and equal judgement, a debate that resolved in the Renaissance into the paragone. This move to a more explicit comparison found its other tap root in the idea characterized by the poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 550–460 BCE), who, according to Plutarch, adopts a similar assessment to Horace, stating, Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens, which is commonly translated as, ‘A poem is a speaking picture, a picture a mute poem’. In discussing this familiar trope, it is seldom noticed that this is a curiously lop-sided equation. In effect it amounts to this: Poem = image + speech; whereas on the other side of the equation it is: Image = poem – speech. So, one side contains image and sound, the other image (albeit poetic), but minus sound. Leonardo da Vinci reformulated this in his discussion of the relationship of the arts to each other in the Paragone: ‘Painting is poetry, which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting, which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the sense by which they penetrate to the intellect.’4 Leonardo is here rebalancing the relationship so that painting remains silent, but poetry becomes equivalent through the loss of visibility. However, he is also suggesting an interpenetration between these seeming contraries, for they also have something of the other within them (painting is a form of poetry even if silent, and poetry a form of painting even if invisible). Ultimately, for Leonardo, painting triumphs over poetry because it can bring together Aristotle’s three unities of action, time and place as he expressed them in the Poetics, more effectively than words alone can.

Orphism in America

147

In the nineteenth century, Wagner constructed an image in which poetic and musical trajectories ultimately meet, conceived as the travels of the poet and the musician around the world in opposite directions: like two travellers who have started from one departure-point, from thence to journey straight ahead in opposite directions. Arrived at the opposite point of the Earth, they meet again; each has wandered round half the planet . . . [then in conversation they exchange experiences and] The Poet has become musician, the Musician poet: now they are both an entire Artistic Man.5

For Wagner, artistic power was amplified through aesthetic synthesis, and this power also lay behind the aspiration to ‘musicalist’ visual expression in the early twentieth century. When Apollinaire and Picabia (and others) invoked music as a model for thinking about abstraction in painting they were calling up the power of music, the power for the abstract to be meaningful, but also the power of music to move, to energize the body, to stimulate feeling, to stir the passions (as Orpheus did). So, as ut pictura poesis modulates into modernism, it is reformulated. This music replaces poetry as the new paradigm: Ut pictura musica,6 as Picabia translates in the title of his painting. This is a phrase first used by the art historian, critic and theatre director Louis Viardot in January 1859, in an article of the same title, ‘Ut pictura musica’, published in the first issue of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. In this article, he draws comparisons between music and visual art: ‘Melody is an intelligent series of sounds, as drawing is an intelligent series of lines or contours; harmony is a simultaneous ensemble of concordant sounds, as colour is an ensemble of corresponding nuances. If the musician speaks of melodic drawing, the painter in his turn speaks of the gamut of tones: proof that the fraternity of the two arts had already passed into language.’7 Viardot argues that the ‘new era’ (the mid-nineteenth century) has brought about a significant shift in aesthetic emphasis; the means of pictorial representation is given prominence over symbolic and allusive content. He writes: ‘the art of painting concerns itself only indifferently with all the objects that nature offers for imitation’.8 While all those whom Apollinaire labelled Orphist aspired to the non-figurative, what they thought they were representing is more difficult to specify positively. Buffet, in her article written in America, quoted in the last chapter, puts it thus: ‘These theories – the first tentative (sic) to form a convention for pictorial composition that will be purely intellectual – are the necessary stages for arriving at a formula that will be absolutely free from any trace of objectivity – that will be expressive by the force of its rhythms, and the relations of line and color – a convention, abstract and free and pure – expressive of the artist’s imagination and desire.’9 So this move from the objects of nature, as Viardot put it, was a move for Buffet toward an emotionally subjective form of expression; an ambition easier to state in theory than to realize in practice: ‘free from any trace of objectivity’, or achieving complete purity, was easier to assert in theory than it was to present in practice. But what the theory represented was an aspiration, and the work, while provisional upon that aspiration, certainly achieved Viardot’s claim for ‘indifference’ to imitation.

148

Improvision

Rather than look to emulate the surface of nature, Picabia’s Music is Like Painting took its formal inspiration from nature, in the form of a scientific illustration of the effects of a magnetic field on three different kinds of particles: alpha, beta and gamma.10 Alpha particles are positively charged, beta particles are negatively charged and gamma radiation is electrically neutral. The diagram shows, therefore, that while alpha (α) and beta (β) radiation can be deflected by electrical fields, gamma (γ) radiation cannot. On a purely visual level, given the title, the illustration might also be taken for a kind of musical instrument with moving strings, or strings in three states, or vibrating strings (see Figure 4.2). One of the most noticeable things about this image is how little Picabia changed it from its scientific source. Apart from the absence of the labelling of the different

Figure 4.2 Diagram showing the effect of electrical fields on alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) radiation. From E. Rutherford, Radioactive Substances and Their Radiations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Orphism in America

149

particles, it is virtually a ‘found object’. The element that Picabia did add was colour. The movement of the particles with the addition of colour now looks more like a series of rainbows than in the original, a representation of ‘bent light’, or light in three states. In this way it is consistent with Apollinaire’s and Delaunay’s Orphic interest in light. Ideas of light arrived with Orphism filtered through both Symbolism and NeoImpressionism. Stimulated by the modern age of son et lumière (electric light, radio waves, etc.) and the hypothesis that at the atomic level everything was animated by electrical impulses, Orphists were lead to similar discoveries by the Italian Futurists (filtered through Severini), who rather poetically expressed it: ‘a street pavement that has been soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps can be an abyss gaping into the very center of the earth’, and, more prosaically, that ‘movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies’.11 Delaunay had also summed this up, two years before Picabia’s painting: The need for a new subject has inspired the poets, launching them onto a fresh path and bringing to their attention the poetry of la Tour [the Eiffel tower], which communicates mysteriously with the whole world. Rays of light, waves of symphonic sounds. Factories, bridges, iron structures, airships, the numberless gyrations of aeroplanes, windows seen by crowds simultaneously.12

Picabia’s painting illustrated and conjoined this mysterious communication of ‘rays of light’ and ‘waves of symphonic sound’. The black background makes the colour stand out more strongly, as well as presenting a flatter, more two-dimensional pictorial space. Picabia here portrays a spectrum, and an equivalence between light and sound, a part of the modern condition, simultaneously. Music is like painting. The ‘found object’ quality of the diagram in Music is Like Painting is shared with his other ‘mechanical paintings’ of this period. For example, Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, from the previous year, 1915, is simply a ‘straight’ reproduction of a spark plug (probably from an advert for a ‘Red Head’ priming plug), with only the addition of the title and a signature. William Homer has convincingly proposed it is in fact a ‘portrait’ of Agnes Meyer, a wealthy woman who financed de Zayas’ Modern Art Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York, where the work was first exhibited in 1916.13 The gallery was owned by the influential Mexican artist, caricaturist, writer and friend of Picabia, Marius de Zayas. In his later collection of writings, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, and in discussing Picabia’s ‘mechanical style’ of imagery, De Zayas quotes the novelist and screenwriter Manuel Komroff: Perhaps the last word of the futurist – and perhaps not. Picabia’s development from his pictures shown at the International Exhibition in 1913 [the Armory Show] and his work shown this summer at the Washington Square Gallery is not very great, yet one can easily see the great struggle and attempt he is making for a newer form. A form of picture which would translate graphically an emotion of music. In a small way this is quite possible, as his exhibition at 291 Fifth Avenue shows, but one is inclined to feel as though the attempt is not as successful as it might have been.

150

Improvision

Of course, I speak only for myself; some of my friends say that the work is successful in transmitting the sensation of music, while, on the other hand, some say it is impossible. One can only judge such things for one’s self.14

After Music is Like Painting Picabia turned to further mechanical images such as The Portrait of a Young American Girl, which is one of a series of five machine imageportraits, or ‘mechanomorphs’ as they became known, published by Picabia in Stieglitz’s magazine 291 between July and August 1915 (issue 5–6). They are, in order, Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz/ Foi et Amour, a portrait of Stieglitz as a camera, but a camera with a collapsed bellows (exhausted by faith and love?), thus incapable of image-making. In the background of this image is a car gearshift (in neutral) and a hand brake (see Figure 4.3). Whatever the exact meaning of the image, it certainly seems to point to a form of impotence, a stasis.15 The next image was a self-portrait, Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait, titled with irony as it is not a portrait of Picabia, but a portrait about him. It takes the form, interestingly, of a sonic object in contradistinction to Stieglitz’s imagemaker (camera), here a car horn seemingly acts as a piston to a chamber with a spark plug at the top in cross section (a giver of light via sound) (see Figure 4.4). This selfportrait is then another conflation of sound and image, like Music is Like Painting, and is strikingly more ‘rampant’, in contrast to Stieglitz’s image of impotence. The most complex image in this series is the third one of De Zayas himself. Whereas the others, including the final image, are more or less a single or pair of images bricolaged together, this portrait takes the form of a type of circuit diagram. Again, a spark plug is evident in the upper right, but directly connected to a corset (see Figure 4.5). This, in turn, is wired into a circuit which seems to revolve around a small motor and terminates in what looks like two speakers or two lights on either side at the bottom, between which is a spool of film. It thus appears as both a version of a car and a more abstract image/sound machine. The sound is also signified by the inclusion of text; sounded internally in the act of ‘reading’ the image, amplified by the exclamation! The final work in the series is Voilà Haviland, a ‘portrait’ of the wealthy collector Paul Haviland, which takes the form of a (more or less) single object (see Figure 4.6); in this case a lamp with what looks like a tube attached, which forms a twin (a bookend) with the sparkplug portrait of Agnes Meyer, another wealthy supporter of the arts and another single object (see Figure 4.7). It includes the text ‘la poesie est comme lui’ (poetry is like him), another reference that evokes Ovid’s Metamorphoses. George Baker has read these mechanomorphs as acting to present ‘relationality between things’, producing an interstitial space which, from a semiotic perspective, presents ‘the work of art as a semiological waystation or pivot’. Thus, ‘the entire series of the mechanomorphs, under the aegis of a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, makes perfect sense’.16 Added to this, as Baker points out in the De Zayas image, is the Ovidian inscription, ‘I have come to the shores of Pont-Euxin’. Pontus Euxinus is Latin for the Black Sea (from the Greek Pontos Euxenios, meaning ‘the hospitable sea’), the site of Ovid’s banishment by Augustus to the city of Tomis on the Black Sea coast, now in Romania.17 ‘The sea! The sea!’ Thálassa, thálassa, is the famous cry, as Xenophon has it in Anabasis (c. 370 BCE) of 10,000 Greek soldiers as they caught sight of the Black Sea

Figure 4.3 Francis Picabia, Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz/Foi et Amour, relief print on paper, published in 291, no. 6, July 1915, New York, part of an accordion portfolio, 37.9 × 22.9 cm, p. 1.

Figure 4.4 Francis Picabia, Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait, relief print on paper, published in 291, no. 6, July 1915, New York, part of an accordion portfolio, 37.9 × 22.9 cm, p. 2.

Figure 4.6 Francis Picabia, Voilà Haviland (La poésie est comme lui), Portrait mécanomorphe de Paul B. Haviland, relief print on paper, published in 291, no. 6, July 1915, New York, part of an accordion portfolio 37.9 × 22.9 cm, p. 3.

Figure 4.5 Francis Picabia, J’ai vu et c’est de toi qu’il s’agit, De Zayas! De Zayas! Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin, relief print on paper, published in 291, no. 6, July 1915, New York, part of an accordion portfolio 37.9 × 22.9 cm, p. 5.

Figure 4.7 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille americaine dans l’état de nudité, relief print on paper, published in 291, no. 6, July 1915, New York, part of an accordion portfolio 37.9 × 22.9 cm, p. 4.

152

Improvision

and realized they were near home, having fled the Persians. This cry is replaced in Picabia’s image by the exclamation of the subject’s name on a line above an image of the sea, a shoreline that is seminal as a liminal space. Baker see these five images as indexical in Peirce’s terms, rather than as iconic or symbolic (respectively, signs that resemble, or that have an arbitrary but culturally determined sign). An indexical image is one that does not rely on mimesis but is caused by the things to which it refers, as a shadow is cast by the sun, or smoke caused by fire. Such a reading is suggestive and forms a supplement to the complex relationship indexicality has to jazz. In the context of the jazz ‘standard’, and within the process of ‘real-time’ composition and improvisatory exchange, there is deviation from, and variation on, the ‘tune’, as standard or theme; the ‘found object’. Jazz too works to communicate resemblance and difference simultaneously; variation is both of the theme and not the theme. In addition to ‘variation’ on the theme (or part), in a jazz performance a quotation, or referencing riff, can also signal a previous performance, or an aspect of the ‘tradition’ to which a particular performance is making reference, and such ‘quotations’ are indexically significant, but only quotation may be called ‘iconic’.18 Because of the importance of improvisation in jazz it is especially well positioned to exploit indexical relationships. Like Picabia’s portrait of De Zayas, rather than producing ‘images’, this indexical strategy produces assemblages of connection and relations, vectors of possible relationships and meanings, opening up the creative and cultural material to endless processes of metamorphosis (à la Ovid).19 The first image that lead to this series of machine portraits is Picabia’s painting Fille Née sans Mère.20 This work edits an image he found in a technical journal relating to railway engineering. Painting over the image and obscuring some parts, he produced another ‘portrait’ of an anonymous woman; the girl born without a mother, the eve from the rib or from the virgin’s womb, referenced by the gold leaf background. This image shares its name with a drawing of 1915.21 Both works sit between the Orphic abstracts of Udnie and Edtaonisl, works that are based on remembering, and the indexical mechanomorphs. Fille Née sans Mère possesses a modified collage element that the drawing does not, but The Portrait of a Young American Girl transplants an image (though not a collage) from an advertisement into a new frame. Due to this ‘modification’ of found materials, Picabia is often seen as a more conservative member of the avant-garde than Duchamp. By making images, Picabia pushed the readymade back into the frame of art, ‘failing’ to challenge the medium of painting as radically as his friend. However, Baker has argued that Picabia recognized the readymade in the ‘abstract’, so to speak. He did not expel the figurative from the abstract (or vice versa), neither did he oppose the ‘object’ and the ‘image’; he did not regard the ready-made as an object, as Duchamp did, but as a force, possessing a symbolic power which, like a live jazz performance, maintains a labile and mutable form: Rather than a challenge to art that would simply replace painting and sculpture with mass-produced objects drawn from the world of the commodity, the readymade for Picabia carried along with it the nomadic existence of those commodities within modernity, their deeper logic as tokens of abstract exchange

Orphism in America

153

– in fact, their inherent transmutability from concrete things into fluid money . . . the readymade responded not to the commodity as an object, but to its existence as a form of exchange, a tool of circulation, a temporary pit-stop on the endless racetrack of money.22

Jazz was another modern art of complex mutablility. While it was distinctly modern and embroiled in monetary exchange (the culture industry, as Adorno argued), it also resisted a too simplistic notion of this contract. As a musical form born to recordings and records (objects), it was also, through the art of the improvisor (a force), born never to repeat itself exactly. Interest in the technology of sound and image reproduction was something Picabia shared with his wife. Buffet had developed this while a student of Busoni. She was very engaged by the possibilities of electronic music production, claiming, ‘With the help of and through improvements to these sound-machines, an objective reconstruction of the life of sound could be possible.We would be discovering sound-forms independently of musical conventions.’23 Although Buffet took this no further forward, another of Busoni’s students was formative in this area, Edgar Varèse, who by 1915 had moved to America.24

Combs I want to mention one further Picabian ‘readymade’ by way of turning the discussion in the direction of Marcel Duchamp. Both Duchamp and Picabia produced works with the same title, in the same year, both forms of readymade and both reference music. The year was 1916 and the title of both works was Peigne (Comb). We have seen Picabia’s usurpation of the ‘mechanical drawing’, manipulated to form portraits, which might be thought of as pictorializations of the readymade, returning them to the status of drawing. But perhaps the most modern image-making that Picabia was to appropriate, was not mechanical drawing per se, but another type of representation with a close relationship between the sign and the referent. In this case, the relationship is so close that in the eyes of some there was hardly a gap at all: photography. Temporarily abandoning the pen and brush, Picabia did not so much pick up the camera as appropriate other people’s photographs. An example is the second cover of his magazine 391, the 10 February 1917 edition, produced in Barcelona, and named in honour of his photographer friend Alfred Stieglitz’s own 291 magazine and gallery. Here he produced (or better, ‘framed’) a photograph of the internal strings and hammer action of an overstrung grand piano. Like the paintings, drawings and mechanomorph images before them, this image too had the important addition of text. Below the title of the magazine, just above the photograph, was the word ‘PEIGNE’. Just below this, but on the photo at the top, are the words ‘Miroir de l’apparence’. At the bottom of the photo is Picabia’s name, apparently written on the soundboard of the piano. His name is then repeated just outside the photo, at the lower right. He is thus doubly named, as author of the image and the magazine. Below, and to the left, is the following ‘poem’ in quotation marks:

154

Improvision

“Regarde au loin, ne regarde pas en arrière on déraisonne quand on veut toujours connaître les raisons”

This can be translated as: “Look ahead, don’t look back Reason unravels When one seeks always to know the reason”

To understand and contextualize the use of this multimedia ‘image and text’ on the cover there is a text on the reverse by Picabia’s friend the art critic Maximilian Gautier. In this text, under his pseudonym Max Goth, Gautier writes a fanciful essay by way of ‘explanation’. In this essay he divides the world into two ‘spiritual families’, descended from the progeny of Adam on the one hand, and from Abraham on the other. The children of Adam are driven by a form of realism, ‘revolving around a fruit dish with three apples’, ‘they try to reproduce by artifice the illusion of what nature and industry do so well’. Whereas the spiritual children of Abraham are concerned with a personal interior world. They believe in the indestructibility of matter and the eternity of the spirit (‘which is like perfume’): The world of ideas and forms appears to them as a sympathetic cosmos, all in correspondences, relationships and resemblances. He perceives what there can be in common . . . between a flower and a combustible engine, between a line and an idea, a color and a memory, a love and a chemical phenomenon, a Biblical person and a doctrine of art, a piano and a comb, the sea and a tramway . . . His sole objective is to entrust, to project into matter, the realities of his inner being. Thus each work of art becomes the representation of a unique world, recreated in the image of a man.25

The image of the piano/comb is thus a ‘mirror of appearance’, as the words that form the ‘title’ of the cover image have it. The piano and the comb reflect, correspond, have a relationship, resemble each other. They form a rhythm between tines and strings. The comb is, of course, also an ‘instrument’ of appearance, a device for dressing the hair; the piano an instrument for decorating the air with sounds. In addition, the comb, with the addition of the most basic of artist’s material, paper, produces what is sometimes called ‘a homemade harmonica’,26 the most democratic of musical instruments, which through simple technology modulated into a kazoo. The kazoo was first documented in a relatively sophisticated version in a patent in January 1883, though probably invented in America in the 1840s by an AfricanAmerican called Alabama Vest. The simple instrument with which most people are familiar was not patented until 1902.27 Nevertheless it, and its homemade comb-andpaper version, is one of a class of instruments called ‘mirlitons’, that produce sound by means of a vibrating membrane. The closest relative of these mirlitons is the African horn-mirliton, an ancient instrument which was often used by shamans with the intention of ‘masking’ or changing the timbre of the voice, to shift identity.

Orphism in America

155

The year before Picabia published this edition of 391 (1916), with its comb/piano on the cover, the ‘Original American Kazoo Company’ was founded in New York.28 The instrument made its recording debut three years after Picabia’s cover in 1921, played by the Original Dixieland Jass Band (sic) on their recording ‘Crazy Blues’.29 The paperand-comb instrument stands at one end of the musical universe, the overstrung grand piano at the other. One is a popular instrument that required virtually no technique or skill, that costs nothing, or very little, and that found its way into jazz, blues and vaudeville acts. The other is a concert instrument, the vehicle of absolute music, requiring years of dedication and practice to achieve proficiency, and which in 1916 would cost c. $1,600.30 Later, however, it became key to jazz as well as concert music. To return to Max Goth’s explanation, what Picabia did was to place a photograph (a copy) of an object (the inside of a piano) as an edited image that now represents, not a ‘documentary’ image of a thing in the real world, but an ‘Abraham’-type image, ‘the representation of a unique world’, that is now as much peigne as it is piano. It does not ‘stand for’ a transparent signified, but instead makes a new signified (a peigne/piano), a mirror of appearance. What is more, they, the comb-and-paper and piano, may also sound as imitation, as a trompe l’oreille device, a second voice: as a Deleuzian simulacrum.31

Duchamp’s objects Duchamp also produced a Peigne at this time; according to the artist, at precisely 11 am on 17 February 1916. Along the top edge of Duchamp’s comb is the following inscription: 3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien à faire avec la sauvagerie; M.D. Feb. 17 1916 11 a.m.32 This comb, like Picabia’s, functions on a number of levels. Thierry de Duve has suggested that it makes reference to the decorator’s comb used by the Cubists to fashion ‘imitation wood graining’; a device that conflated the house painter with the fine artist and, like Picabia’s comb, raises issues of copies and originals. In a cubist painted world it produces an illusion of real wood grain, but as painted wood stands as more real, by virtue of its medium. The object’s name also puns on painting more generally: ‘Peigne is the subjunctive mode of the verb peindre (to paint), either in the first or in the third person. It could be read as ‘qu’il peigne!’ (let him paint!) and might be referring to Picasso who, not lacking wit himself, had used a comb to paint the hair and moustache of his Poet.’33 The richest pun, as De Duve points out, is que je peigne!, which might be rendered as ‘I ought to paint’ or ‘If only I could paint’. But for both Picabia and Duchamp, the crisis of expression engendered by modernism and which, post-cubism, had first been answered by Orphic abstraction, had, at least for Duchamp, reached an impasse. The solution to this stalemate could only mean, for him, the bypassing or abandonment of painting altogether. [W]hat is referred to in Peigne is an intricate set of feelings toward painting, involving nostalgia, impotence, and jealousy, but also joy, irony, and revenge.

156

Improvision

Painting had become impossible, and the artist who had worked so hard – mainly during his ‘Cubist’ period – to become a painter worthy of the name could not simply abandon it without a certain melancholy.34

But elsewhere De Duve stresses that Duchamp’s point is not that painting is impossible, but that industrialization has replaced it by mechanical means, principally through film and photography. These are truly popular arts, and thus painting is rendered objectively useless. It remains subjectively possible, but only through mediation as a moral choice. For Duchamp, ‘Painting may be doomed by industrialization, but as long as the desire . . . to paint survives, to abandon painting means to postpone actual work.’ In this way painting maintains potential. ‘Duchamp’s Peigne – both the object and the pun in its title – is the work in which he recorded his abandonment of painting and made it significant.’35 De Duve sums up: ‘Referring to cubism and to its abstract aftermath, it is the most extraordinary allegorical condensation of the two main topoi of pictorial purism, the tabula rasa and the last painting. Duchamp refrained from painting so that painting, in its potential, unactualized state, would forever remain possible.’36 A similar melancholy had been earlier expressed by Picabia in 1912–13, not so much for the act of painting itself, but for the idea of abstraction as a way of painting. This was when Picabia too turned to the ‘mechanical’. As he expressed it himself, ‘Udnie is no more the portrait of a young girl than Edtaonisl is the image of a priest, such as we might normally conceive of them. They are memories [or, to objectify them, souvenirs] of America, evocations of it, subtly arranged in the manner of a musical composition; they represent an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression.’37 Picabia’s statement betrays a similar mood to Duchamp’s; memories, nostalgia and the passing of impressions. Perhaps this feeling is most fully realized in the mysterious text he sent to Stieglitz for publication in Camera Work, known as the ‘Amorphism Manifesto, 1913’. Most interesting here are the two illustrations that accompany the ‘argument’ of the text. The most abstract of paintings, two black canvases – one ‘of ’ a woman in a bath (Femme au bain), the other ‘of ’ the sea (La Mer). The caption below the former reads: ‘Look for the woman, they say. What a mistake! Through the opposition of tints and the diffusion of the lights, the woman is not visible to the naked eye.’ The state of being naked here, for both woman and viewer, is equated with blankness. The caption below the latter reads, ‘At first glance you see nothing. Press on. With time you will see that the water reaches up to your lips. This is amorphism.’ Both images are ‘signed’ by Popaul Picador and it is probably, as Jeffrey Weiss suggests, a reference to Kupka’s ‘musicalist’ painting Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours.38 What Duchamp and Picabia register, in spite of the fact that Picabia continued to produce abstract painting periodically throughout his career, is that the act of imagemaking in a post-industrial age had now lost its simple ‘purity’; that is, its perceived straightforward relationship between sign and referent. Progress was not to be sought in the ‘pure’ but in the hybrid. The hyperbolic nature of the text of this new school of ‘formlessness’ is clear throughout, proclaiming that, through research, ‘intrepid innovators’ will lead to ‘the single and multiple formula that will contain the entire

Orphism in America

157

visible and sentimental universe’; the twinning of ‘single’ and ‘multiple’ and ‘visible’ and ‘sentimental’ underlines the absurdity. Two identical (blank) ‘paintings’ are framed by words that explain their ‘content’ in completely different terms. The ambiguity of this remarkable text acts out the impossibility of translating painting into words; is it a parody, or, perhaps more elaborately, a form of performance, performing the ambiguity it seems to be explaining in words and images?39 Buffet’s music teacher Busoni wrote about this problem of sign and referent, ‘the lawgivers require the interpreter to reproduce the rigidity of the signs; they consider his reproduction the nearer to perfection, the more closely it clings to the signs. What is needed is the inspiration of the interpreter.’ He continues, ‘To the lawgivers, the signs themselves are the most important matter [but] . . . Great artists play their own works differently at each repetition, remodel them on the spur of the moment, accelerate and retard, in a way which they could not indicate by signs.’40 Notation misses the essential elasticity of form. Picabia is making a similar point: abstract image-making was amorphous, improvised, seemingly formless while still having form. As a type of performance, music is again a model. But whereas the initial ambition of abstraction had been tied to a model of ‘absolute music’, the model of jazz is more appropriate, as here the model is not ‘purity’, but is closer to an idea Busoni promoted in the text quoted above, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907). Busoni’s remarkable text sets out not to so much to answer questions as to explain points along the way to an answer; ‘an innumerable series of lesser problems’. Written some time before Greenberg’s writings on modernism, it identifies the modernist characteristics of art as adhering in their ‘essential means and ends’; ‘painting degenerates, when it forsakes the flat surface in depiction and takes on complexity in theatrical decoration’.41 Busoni goes on to rail against two poles of the youngest of the arts, music. These two positions are ‘figurative’ music (programme music) and absolute music: the former as trivial, the latter as formalist. What both Picabia and Buffet had witnessed, whether consciously or not, was a solution to this problem. The problem was expressed by Busoni in terms of lexis: ‘Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form. The very intention to write down the idea compels a choice of measure and key. The form, and the musical agency, which the composer must decide upon, still more closely define the way and the limits.’42 Busoni argued that to avoid formlessness (by surrendering the outmoded forms of absolute music) music needed to become a selfgenerating system, but lexis (notation) stood in the way: ‘Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model.’43 Busoni is locked into a Platonic conception which holds to a ‘work’: ‘For the musical art-work exists . . . complete and intact’44 – which does not hold true in the same way for jazz. Indeed, ragtime and jazz were thought of by many critics to be so dependent on ‘inspiration’ as to be entirely amorphous.45 In fact, the identity of the ‘standard’ holds form in the present, even as group improvisation develops a selfgenerating system that takes real-time composing in unpredictable directions. For a player like Sidney Bechet, who never learnt to ‘read’ music, making music was centred on a more mutable identity, far from the Platonic archetype. Indeed, Bechet actively

158

Improvision

refused to learn to read music, preferring to remain an ‘ear’ player, as a way (even if misguided) of protecting his abilities as an improvisor.46 Like Picabia’s Comb, and perhaps in duet with it, Duchamp’s Comb is also ‘potentially musical’. As comb-and-paper, it has the possibility of being a mirliton (and why would an artist not add paper?), but also, the metal tines invite plucking (Figure 4.8).47 Thus, from the class of mirliton, we have a modulation to the class of lamellophone. Another member of this class would be the musical box, which produces music by the plucking of tuned, steel teeth on a comb (Figure 4.9). But this type of lamellophone finds its most common example in the African Shona mbira, or as it is also known the ‘thumb piano’ (Figure 4.10).48 Of course, in Duchamp’s case the lamellae are not sounded, but that is of little consequence, they remain as a potential sound device. A prospective sound instrument is described in his Green Box. He writes, ‘Make a readymade with a box containing something unrecognizable by its sound and solder

Figure 4.8 Marcel Duchamp, Comb, 1916, steel, 16.5 × 3.2 × 0.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, Accession no. 1950-134-72. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp.

Figure 4.9 ‘Music box with comb and cylinder. 70 lamellae’ Image by Gin Dun San, Pixabay, copyright free to use (https://pixabay.com/photos/music-box-music-melodyinstrument-4869274/)

Orphism in America

159

Figure 4.10 Contemporary mbira (thumb piano), 24 keys, Zimbabwe. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mbira1.png. Photo: Alan Weeks.

the box . . . already done in the semi readymade of copper plates and a ball of twine.’49 This last- mentioned work is his With Hidden Noise (1916). This work consists of a ball of string inserted between two brass plates that are joined in turn by four long screws. The mystery attached to this particular readymade derives from the unknown object placed inside the ball. With the exception of the artist’s friend and benefactor, Walter Arensberg, who placed the object inside the ball, no one knew what the object was, including Duchamp himself. Although he was interested in the relationship of sounds to objects and the displacement, or ‘delay’ of the relationship between them, sound and object are not immediately identified or ‘connected’,50 as he describes elsewhere in the Green Box, ‘Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sound sculpture which lasts.’51 Sounds are in this way rather similar to ‘imprints’ or shadows, ‘relays’ of intuition. Susi Bloch has written of Duchamp: He was interested in the way things and concepts imprint themselves and he was conscious of the imprint as it suggests a process of thought, a process of knowing, those operations or ‘relays’ of intuition and cognition which are instantaneously and ultimately elusive, but which provide metaphors, distorted tracings of their event and sense. In the Box of 1914, which foreshadows the more ambitious Green Box of 1934, one of the 16 facsimile manuscript notes reads: ‘One can look at (see)

160

Improvision

seeing; one can’t hear hearing.’ This special condition, this ‘looking at seeing’ was for Duchamp the content of art, or rather, that which he proposed as its content. Relatedly the peculiar, often quixotic relationship between idea and/or object and its graphic, iconic and/or eidetic translation formulates itself as the continuous and primary preoccupation of his work.52

The question not asked here is can one see hearing? Or hear seeing? A question already answered in part in his own image discussed in chapter 2 (piano à queue), where the text sounds the same, but looks different, which is of course the condition of all puns. But it is not just word games that do this, notation of all sorts, as Busoni recognized, hold sight and sound in tension. Even musical instruments (including pianos, kazoos, combs and thumb pianos) are agents or tools, utensils that act as vehicles or catalysts for action. They, like notation, hold the potential for sound (for all sorts of sounds, not just the obvious conventional musical ones) and as such are sonically eidetic. The box format, used by Duchamp in The White Box (1914–23), and in The Green Box of 1934, is likewise consistent with his interest in ‘delays’. All these box works contain loose sets of notes and images. In this way, artistic control is subverted. Rather than an authorially controlled narrative sequence, the reader is invited to select, shuffle, play with the notes, in effect to perform them, as an improvising musician would. They are a resource, rather than a ‘work’ in the sense Goehr defines it: Thus, a musical work is held to be a composer’s unique, objectified expression, a public and permanently existing artifact made up of musical elements . . . A work is fixed with respect, at least, to the properties indicated in the score and it is repeatable in performances. Performances themselves are transitory sound events intended to present a work by complying as closely as possible with the given notational specification.53

For Duchamp, while the context is fixed, the order is random, or, at least, outside the ‘author’s’ control. In addition, the texts themselves are hardly ‘explanations’, more aperçus. Almost overheard fragments of explanation that do not quite add up, a type of hypertext that shifts from ‘readerly’ (lisible) to ‘writerly’ (scriptural). As discussed earlier in relation to Barthes, the ‘reader’ here is no longer a (passive) consumer, but an (active) producer of the text, a creative performer. While Cage is often invoked in this context (and his works do form a parallel), it is also true that jazz forms a common resonance with these values. The traditional written musical text (the work in the form of a score) is a complex example of the readerly text. The jazz performance is a writerly text, composed in real time, often involving quotes and references to other works and performers. More recently this would include the improvised use of recordings, in the context of sampling and mixing, as in the Norwegian jazz musician Jan Bang’s live remix, improvising with samplers and other electronics.54 If this seems surprising, it should be remembered that there is a physical proximity between Barthes’ essay on the ‘Death of the Author’ and Duchamp’s text the ‘Creative Act’, recorded and read by the author. They were both (among other texts) first

Orphism in America

161

published in the avant-garde magazine Aspen (5/6), described by the publisher as ‘the first three-dimensional magazine’.55 The 5/6 edition was edited and designed by Brian O’Doherty and also includes Susan Sontag’s ‘noisy’ (and lengthy) essay on the ‘Aesthetic of Silence’.56 Both the content of the writings and the format of Aspen, which was published in a box together with tapes, recordings and texts, make it not so much a conventional magazine, as another Duchamp-like box of sights and sounds. It is important to note that Duchamp’s text is not presented as a written text but as spoken words, therefore as sound, in the form of a record of the author reading it (with the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck on the ‘B’ side: ‘Four Poems from Phantastiche Gebete (1916)’, read by the author). Returning to combs: in The Green Box we also find the following mysterious statement: ‘classify combs by the number of their teeth’. Duchamp here offers up a type of orthodontic classification that links piano keys, combs and teeth, the former resembling the latter and often manufactured from the same material, ivory. It might also remind us of a key passage in Dickens’s novel of the inhumanity of industrialization, Hard Times: the conflict over the definition of a horse, between Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus horse rider, and Gradgrind’s star pupil Bitzer. Here Dickens pits bald facts as a dry substitute for imaginative understanding and empathy. Sissy, who just knows what a horse is, having grown up around them, feels that a horse is a horse, something so obvious and felt as to defy verbal definition. When pressed by Gradgrind to sum up a horse in words, she fails to offer a characterization. Bitzer, on the other hand, has no trouble in offering a rote definition: ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’57 A definition focused on the mouth and feet. In much the same way, Duchamp proposed the number of teeth as some kind of defining signifier, as absurd a way of designating a comb as it is a definition of a horse to a horseman: ‘now you know what a horse [comb] is’! Pianos can also be defined by keys; early pianos had 49 keys, modern pianos have 88. Bösendorfer produce a concert grand with 92 keys and Stuart and Sons make a 102-note key board. In the same way, Picabia’s Orphist canvases are not necessarily antithetical to his machinist or ‘readymade’ images. Thierry de Duve regards the advent of the readymade as intimately linked to the history of painting, rather than an intervention in the discourse of sculpture. He sees Duchamp’s abandonment of painting and invention of the former as events in the narrative of painting, rather than as a step outside it. In relation to the periodic claim (made since at least the middle of the last century) that painting is in a terminal state of collapse, to be counterpoised by the rise of the readymade (or one of the readymade’s many avatars), De Duve’s claim is that these two ‘opposites’, of painting and readymade, are bound together. He writes, every five years or so painting alternately agonizes and rises from its ashes . . . This swing of the pendulum is a symptom. Not only does it indicate that some hidden solidarity must exist between these two trends that apparently negate each other; it also calls for a re-examination of the art-historical context in which the readymade appeared, as an offspring of Duchamp’s abandonment of painting. The birth of

162

Improvision

abstract painting is the relevant context, and as such, it is theoretical and aesthetic as well as art-historical. It revolves around the issue of specificity – or purity – attached to the word ‘painting.’58

Improvisus (more words on improvisation) If Pater’s injunction is correct, then the readymade, as part of the history of painting, is also linked to the ‘condition of music’. But music is not a singular concept, nor did it necessarily signify for Duchamp in the same way as it did for other modernist painters. Ideas of music are polyphonic. As we have seen, two powerful musical counterpoints moved through the currents of modernism at the first half of the century, one the absolute ‘classical’ model of European art, an art of structural complexity fixed around the vision of the score, the other jazz music, a hybrid African-American popular form that focused instead on performance and improvisation; two differing, but not entirely opposed ontological identities. While I have, elsewhere, pitted the formalism of absolute music against the idea of a synthetic impulse (in that context, in the guise of the Gesamtkunstwerk), we should not regard jazz as necessarily antithetical to absolute music. Instead, while at their extremes they may present opposing faces, they also share many characteristics. Indeed, the ‘opposition’ between ‘improvisation’ and ‘composition’ is not stark, or even truly oppositional. The philosopher Bruce Ellis Benson has argued: ‘the binary schema of composition/ performance always has followed a kind of dialogue . . . Yet . . . the dialogical character of music making is not particularly well described by that binary schema, and . . . that binary schema has significantly inhibited genuine dialogue.’59 His point is that composition inevitably involves improvisation, and improvisation, or real-time composition, is exactly that, a type of composition, one based on an understanding and knowledge of principles and choices. It is not creation ex nihilo, it is effectively a dialogue between memory, knowledge and the present in the moment of performance. A key concept here (as in art) is that of representation. While the etymology of ‘improvisation’ shows the term’s root to be in the Latin improvisus, which translates as ‘unforeseen’, this is itself to hide the structures and ideologies that lurk in the shadows. Improvisation is not a concept with hard edges and it often relies on sight as well as sound. As a model it also places all vectors – composers, performers, and listeners – as partners in the conversation, much as Duchamp suggested in relation to artists, viewers and, we might add, curators. Classical music is often regarded as the re-presentation of a composer’s ideas via a score; the presentation of something that was present in the ‘work’, and which it is the job of the performer to accurately re-present. Jazz, on the other hand, seems to be about presentation (rather than re-presentation). The presentation of something that comes into existence in the moment and is not to be repeated. The jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy emphasizes the temporal framework in which improvisation or composition takes place: ‘In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.’60

Orphism in America

163

It might be more helpful to regard improvisation as akin to gender performativity in Butler’s terms, not as something that is not made up, so much as negotiated. Butler’s definition of gender is as a ‘practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint’.61 It is therefore a type of re-framed re-presentation, so that in jazz, for example, improvisation is the application of existing musical ideas applied new, or ideas built up from pre-existing (ready-made) fragments. This approach echoes a point famously made by Derrida in a talk read during a live performance by the ‘free-jazz’ musician Ornette Coleman (discussed in Chapter 5). For Derrida all performativity, and all notions of singularity, originality and immediacy, are tied to repetition: the very act of communication and understanding requires it. When, for him, modernity claims a type of pure invention, it fails to recognize its own inventive force.62 Jazz improvisation is thus a site of negotiation, where signifying practices (i.e. music-making in history and tradition) are developed in embodied experiences, subjectively in relation to other embodied musical expressions (other performers performing). This issue of embodiment is important in relation to all music making. Julie Dawn Smith summarizes; ‘Our experience of, and participation with sound is inseparable from our experience of, and participation with, our body and the bodies of others. The resonances of sound waves register in the very fibres of each and every body in ways that confound the assumed discreteness of exterior and interior space.’63 Beyond this, in jazz in particular, the musical gesture, the musical idea, is regularly communicated by visual embodied expression. Gesture, whether physical or mental, gives shape and impetus to musical time. Musical expression and perception depend on common ways of shaping gesture in time. It is in this sense that music is an inherently intersubjective phenomenon. . . . When jazz musicians improvise, expression and perception must be almost simultaneous. Only the sort of shared mapping of sound to meaningful gesture, proposed by a number of researchers today, can explain the extraordinary attunement and synchrony improvising musicians demonstrate.64

This might be facial expression, physical disposition – nodding, bodily or facial tension and relaxation, the enacted shape of musical phrasing, or ‘seeing’ what a fellow improvisor is doing (in addition to hearing them), etc. As the developmental psychologist Maya Gratier writes: ‘The body movements of musicians not only support the production of sound but also communicate the organisational aspects of the musical piece both to each other and to audiences.’65 These ideas of embodied cognition have also been developed in the writings of the American jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, who has set out, as he has put it himself, to ‘explore the role of physical embodiment and sociocultural situatedness in music cognition’. Drawing from recent advances in cognitive science, he argues that music cognition should be understood as intimately tied in with the body and its physical and sociocultural environment, ‘a perspective that was previously neglected in the music cognition literature’.66 The binary divides between exterior and interior (a largely Cartesian concept) and improvisation and composition, are as problematical as the

164

Improvision

border between jazz and classical musics. Differences are significant, but they are negotiated through cultural practice. Nevertheless, one of the defining characteristics of modernism is its drive to establish a hierarchy via concepts of purism and authenticity. Such hierarchies, in this context, should be seen to represent ambitions, not necessarily achievements. Duchamp was a modernist artist who was especially sensitive to this contingent nature of signification. Indeed, his concept of the readymade is dependent on it. The former aspiration, to strip art down to its essentials, to concentrate on media specificity, is seen clearly in early abstract painting. As De Duve sums it up: ‘For when the early abstractionists spoke of pure painting, they understood its specificity to mean that which defines painting qua painting, trans-historically and universally: some essence that they supposed to be common to all paintings . . . they prescribed that the painter’s task was to make this essence visible.’67 What is sometimes missed is the irony that such ‘purity’ was reached via the infectious model of another art, music. There is a further paradox that such generalizations attach to abstraction and modernism more generally. Similar shifts in nomenclature can be seen as the ‘poetic’ modulates to its later manifestation as ‘text’. Likewise, ‘musicality’ shifts across a divide to become the more general signifier ‘sound’, as ‘theatricality’ morphs into the ‘happening’. Despite these modulations, there continues to be, as De Duve puts it, a desire ‘to annexe mundane, nonartistic matter, while reducing their field to some specific and irreducible “essence” . . . The generic seems to precede the specific.’68 In the early stages of modernism this essence was sought in material, in media specificity, the ‘fundamental’ phenomenological make-up of painting; in paint, colour and the support on which it was spread (usually canvas). As Pater argued, the art that already seemed to be made of essential stuff was music, where form and content were integrated. Beyond this formalism (or because of it) music had the power to speak to our inner lives without the need for translation. How might painting aspire to this condition? Through direct contact with its material and form? As Paul Gauguin said, ‘Colour, which like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.’69 The role of subjectivity is important here, and constitutes a direct appeal to an inner reality, a constituent of modernity’s insularity.

Part 2 Kandinsky’s improvisations: America and the Orphic spirit Such an approach finds full realization in the aesthetic of Wassily Kandinsky, an artist for whom musicality was central. Kandinsky wrote in 1911 in Über das Geistige in der Kunst, translated as On the Spiritual in Art, which title continues, and painting in particular, in section IV, ‘The Pyramid’:

Orphism in America

165

the arts as such have never in recent times been closer to one another than in this latest period of spiritual transformation. In all that we have discussed above lie hidden the seeds of the struggle towards the non-naturalistic, the abstract, towards inner nature . . . Consciously or unconsciously, artists turn gradually towards an emphasis on their materials. From this effort there arises of its own accord the natural consequence – the comparison of their own elements with those of other arts. In this case, the richest lessons are to be learned from music.70

Kandinsky, like Duchamp and Picabia, but unlike Kupka, had work exhibited at the Armory Show in America in 1913. In Kandinsky’s case (unlike Duchamp and Picabia) he was represented by a single painting, his Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love II),71 which was purchased by Stieglitz on 8 March, for a cost of $500. To put this purchase in perspective, the other seven works Stieglitz purchased from the Armory Show came to a combined grand total of $267.50. Prior to this purchase, Steiglitz had translated and published extracts from On the Spiritual in Art, considering Kandinsky to be in the vanguard of European painting. Following the Chicago openings of the Armory Show, the art collector Arthur Jerome Eddy gave a public lecture in support of this Kandinsky inspired vision of modern art. And a year later he published a more developed account in his book Cubists and Post-Impressionism.72 In this book, Eddy discusses Kandinsky at length (and for the first time in America), explaining that at the Armory Show his Improvisation No. 27 met with ‘no words of explanation’. He goes on, ‘Kandinsky’s Improvisations does seem – at first glance – the last word in extravagance; on fourth or fifth glance it appears to have a charm of color that is fascinating; on study it begins to sound like color music.’ He then quotes a review of an exhibition in London in which three of Kandinsky’s works were shown, a Landscape with Two Poplars and two Improvisations, Numbers 27 and 30. The review was in fact by Roger Fry. In this review the English art critic uses the expression visual music for the first time: ‘As one contemplates the three, one finds that after a time the improvisations become more definite, more logical and the more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their colour oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium. They are pure visual music’73 The title of ‘improvisation’ is thus early on linked to music on both sides of the Atlantic. The Houghton Mifflin Company, Kandinsky’s American publisher, translated Kandinsky’s text as The Art of Spiritual Harmony. The translator was Michael T. H. Sadler who wrote in the introduction, ‘Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say he has broken down the barrier between music and painting and has isolated the pure emotion, which for want of a better name we call artistic emotion.’74 Sadler goes on: ‘Anyone who has listened to good music with any enjoyment will admit to an unmistakable but quite indefinable thrill. He will not be able, with sincerity, to say that such a passage gave him such visual impressions, or such a harmony roused in him such emotions. The effect of music is too subtle for words. And the same with

166

Improvision

this painting of Kandinsky’s . . . Kandinsky is striving to give [painting] that power and prove what is at least the logical analogy between colour and sound, between line and rhythm of beat.75

In the The Little Review of November 1914 there was both a review of Eddy’s book, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, and an advert for Sadler’s translation of Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony, which uses the ‘Kandinsky is painting music’ quotation to advertise it. This is, interestingly, followed by a review of a recital in Chicago by the pianist Harold Victor Bauer,76 who had, among other things, premièred Debussy’s Children’s Corner in Paris in 1908, in which, as mentioned, Debussy composed his own rag, the Golliwog’s Cakewalk. In discussing Bauer’s ‘happy variety of tone-colors at his command’, there followed an extract from Kandinsky’s text: In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a ’cello, a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all – an organ . . . Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations of the soul.77

Thus, the sentiment expressed in Art of Spiritual Harmony that ‘the various arts of today learn from each other and often resemble each other’78 is put into practice in a page of the magazine. It is of note that some of the most prominent works by Kandinsky to be seen in America are his Improvisations. Indeed, after the Armory Show Eddy purchased his own work by Kandinsky, another of the ‘Improvisations’ (No. 30), which he examines at length in his book. During this analysis he quotes a letter to him from the artist in which Kandinsky ‘explains several elements’, but insists: ‘This entire description is chiefly an analysis of the picture which I have painted rather subconsciously in a state of strong inner tension. So intensively did I feel the necessity of some of the forms.’79 Toward the end of On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky offers a definition of this type of painting, one of three categories: ‘Impressions’, ‘Compositions’ and ‘Improvisations’. The latter are ‘expressions of the process of the inner character, usually produced unconsciously and abruptly; in other words, impressions of the inner [non-material] nature’. The motive of improvisation and the strong emphasis on music as a model for abstract painting (especially in American circles with Sadler’s introduction and translation) bring into alliance ideas around emergent jazz as a modern condition of music, even when such music was not to the forefront of Kandinsky’s mind in formulating his ideas and works. Both these modern art forms placed emphasis on real-time composition as an expressive vehicle. Eddy brings the two conditions of music together and compares ragtime and Beethoven directly: The enjoyment of music is a curious thing. First of all, there are all kinds of music, from rag-time to Beethoven, and each kind has its following.

Orphism in America

167

Then the following of each kind breaks up into rag-time and Beethoven divisions. That is to say, in an audience listening to rag-time there are always a few who enjoy the music in a Beethoven way – for what there is of real value in it. While in an audience listening to a Beethoven symphony, there are always a goodly number, often a big majority, who enjoy it in a rag-time way – just the emotional reaction, without knowing a thing about music. There are two entirely distinct enjoyments of the same compositions – the purely intellectual and the purely emotional.80

He also describes different types of cubism, à la Apollinaire, one of which is ‘Cubism Orphique’ (‘created entirely by the artist; it takes nothing from visual, objective realities, but is derived wholly from the painter’s imagination; it is pure art’).81 He argues that while music is often listened to in a rag-time kind of way (emotional), unfortunately paintings are rarely looked at like this: ‘understanding is not essential to enjoyment in a purely emotional sense . . . What is true of the enjoyment of music should be true of the enjoyment of painting.’82 In effect, Eddy argues for a rag-time approach to Cubism Orphique: ‘Why not accept at their face value all pictures that are beautiful in line and color, without bothering about their meaning? . . . One part of the theory of the Cubists is as old as that of the Orphists. It is simply that the painter can do with line and color what the composer does with sound.’83 I now turn to an artist for whom jazz was in his repertoire, one who used the Orphic impulse to turn to abstraction, and who has some claim to being America’s first homegrown abstractionist, Arthur Dove.

Arthur Garfield Dove (1990–1946): records and painting Such ideas had perhaps their greatest influence in America on the artist Arthur Dove, who exhibited in Stieglitz’s Intimate gallery six canvases inspired by jazz music in 1927.84 He had seen Improvisation No. 27 at the Armory Show, and read Kandinsky’s ideas in German in Über das Geistige in der Kunst. His interest focused on the power of the musical analogy, the ‘Orphic spirit’, to develop the paradigm of abstraction in painting, and produced paintings directly on this theme. Between 1913 and 1944 he painted seventeen paintings related to music, the earliest Music and Sentimental Music in the 1910s, and in the following decade Chinese Music and Factory Music, Silver, Yellow, Indian-Red and Blue. The peak of this interest was in 1927, when he painted the six jazz canvases. These works were exhibited at Stieglitz’s gallery: George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue Part I and Part II (the original recording, on 78rpm, had the work divided over two sides), I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise–George Gershwin and Orange Grove in California–Irving Berlin. A further painting called Rhythm Rag, named after another Paul Whiteman recording, appears to be on this theme, but this work has since been lost. His direct calligraphic style in Improvision (Figure 4.11) of 1927 resembles both Kandinsky’s paintings of similar title, but in his case refers to jazz directly. These jazz paintings are unusual in that they were developed as duets with records, rather than painted in relation to the silent, abstracted ‘idea’ of music. While many

168

Improvision

Figure 4.11 Arthur G. Dove, Improvision, 1927. Oil on board; 15.5 × 14.5 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of Lucille and Donald Graham, 1997.312. Photography © Denver Art Museum.

artists had music playing while they painted (Kupka, for example), very few painted as a direct response to records. Dove is remarkable in providing a record of painted improvisation to gramophone recordings. This small group of paintings by him are thus emblematic of both a particular moment in the evolution of abstraction in painting, and a particular moment in the history of music, one in which the fixing of sound in an object became possible, not just the ‘fixing’ of sound through symbols. What Dove sought to do was re-inscribe this ‘record of sound’ back into a graphic and abstract series of signs, a form of ‘rag-time painting’ as described by Eddy.

Improvision By the time Dove was modulating his paintings towards abstraction, the technology of recording music was available on a commercial scale and for domestic consumption for the first time. In the works referencing Gershwin and Berlin, Dove’s approach was

Orphism in America

169

to initiate painting along with a recording of the specific piece from which the final painting gets its name.85 Dove purchased these records after he attended a concert of Whitman’s orchestra on 15 December 1925. All these works are dated 1927 in the catalogue raisonné. Improvision represents in some ways a key to the jazz series. Indeed, it is a paradigm case, because unlike the other four works painted to recordings,86 this work is not specifically addressed to a titled piece of music. Improvision is more general, indeed the title is a laconic compression of ‘improvisation’ and ‘vision’.87 This work, by title and image, encapsulates the special concerns of painting improvisatory marks to real time music-listening, in ways worth considering in some detail.88 The range of marks may be more limited and relatively simplified, but they represent a nascent vocabulary. It is worth pointing out that Dove worked on the vocabulary of these paintings over several months, so although the images came originally from improvised painting to music, they were not simply composed in real time. They may have utilized marks discovered through direct improvisation, but these marks appear to have been deployed through the series by compositional choice. In this way they resemble Whiteman’s and Gershwin’s approaches to jazz. In Gershwin’s case his music was composed, albeit often generated from piano improvisation. Gershwin, like other composers (Stravinsky for example), often ‘composed’ at the piano.89 Whiteman’s jazz was also marked by careful orchestration and tight execution with apparently little room, or interest on his part, in spontaneity. However, key musicians in his orchestra were provided with the opportunity for limited improvisation.90 Dove’s marks are carefully arranged, but their form was generated from the liberating experience of painting to music. On the right of the Improvision there is an ‘unwound’ green gesture that resembles the clock-spring collaged in Rhapsody in Blue: Part I. There are also two sets of looped lines. The centre has a cross-hatched area filled in with brown and green, a vertical line with three black bars that forms a kind of mast with a sail in green and orange. Below this is a red and black wavy line, and six dark green brush marks on the edge of a green and red dotted pattern, above which rises another green ‘unwound’ mark in answer to the descending one on the right. This ‘unwound’ mark is not a single gesture but is made from bars and dashes. The spiral scratch of the inscribed 78rpm disc, the gradual unwinding of the gramophone machine, the dense texture of grooves, the pulse of the music and the timbre of the melody, are thus ‘transcribed’. But this is not marks aspiring to notation, but the seeking out of signs through the development of analogues and gestures, to invoke the emotions of jazz and the action of listening to mechanical music, spontaneously felt in the body and transcribed by the hand. Similar graphic gestures can be found in all the other record paintings; looping lines, undulating gestures, bars and dashes. They signify the technology of modern listening and the textures of the sounds and music heard. In Improvision a fairly straightforward relationship between figure and ground is maintained, whereby the pale background seems to hold the more spontaneous ‘melodic’ and rhythmic gestures close to the picture plane. However, the application of this ‘ground’ appears on top of the other marks in places; this is especially noticeable with the loops in the bottom right and the inside section of the ‘dot-and-dash’ marks top left. An even more complex relationship between figure and ground is developed in

170

Improvision

Orange Grove in California–Irving Berlin and the three Gershwin works, especially the two Rhapsody paintings. In Rhapsody in Blue, Part II (Figure 4.12) this figure-with-ground integration is aided by the oval format, which provides a centipedal force that pulls the black gestures together with the colours. In this work the colour gestures and the black, rhythmic strokes seem to have been applied in alternating fashion so that sometimes the black is over a colour and sometimes vice versa. This pulls the overall composition together to fuse the whole against a tighter, homogenized conception of the picture plane. A thicker, more forward pictorial space that moves away from the conventional space of mimetic imagery.

Figure 4.12 Arthur Dove, Rhapsody in Blue, Part II , 1927, Michael Scharf Family Collection, oil, metallic paint and ink on paperboard, 45.7 × 31.8 cm/ 50.8 × 38.1 cm. Photo: Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

Orphism in America

171

In contrast, Rhapsody in Blue, Part I (Figure 4.13) maintains a sense of fictive space with the lighter blue colours providing a background against which the other forms press the picture plane, but here again, as with Improvision, there is ‘overpainting’ in the background, which makes more complex the relationship of colour to black-mark gestures, embedding them in a space that sits further back than Part II . In addition, Part I has the collaged element of the clock-spring, which makes literal the flat pictorial space. It also manifests an explicit temporal unwinding, as the

Figure 4.13 Arthur Dove, Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, 1927, Michael Scharf Family Collection, oil and metallic paint on aluminum with clock spring, 26.7 × 22.2 cm. Photo Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

172

Improvision

phonograph winds down against the rhythmic play of the marks and the music. The play with time and rhythm in Rhapsody in Blue is evident in its main theme. David Schiff puts it in his analysis of Gershwin’s music: ‘Oddly enough, the most famous melody in twentieth-century concert music is never played as written. The theme implies two different possible phrase structures, depending on how the notation is interpreted.’ He goes on to explain that on the first recording this theme is played as a slow fox-trot and phrased as 8+6+8. What Gershwin plays accelerates during the first four bars of the counter melody, and then retards in the last two: stopping a ‘mechanical tempo relation’. He goes on: If we assume that Gershwin began with an 8+8 model in mind, we can see that he stretched out the blues third of the tune. The result looks like an eight-bar phrase on the page but sounds like an augmentation of the five-bar phrase 2+3. To counteract this augmentation, Gershwin elided the end of A with the beginning of B, making the phrase 8+6. Gershwin’s performances show that he intended something different from the way the theme was notated.91

Dove’s painting too pits mechanical time against augmented gestures, demonstrating central issues of temporality in abstraction: the complex relationship between individual temporal gestures and overall structural composition, which is negotiated (as it was for Gershwin) in ‘performance’. In addition, the reading and temporal understanding of the painting is necessarily improvised by the viewer. In all of these paintings, the black gestures form a rhythmic element, a groove of mark- making, with passages of continuity as in the section down-up the right-hand side of Part I, in contrast to more isolated individual gestures. The colours provide chordal or harmonic points of interest (not equivalence). Some marks are no doubt translations of sonic, rhythmic experiences, some are visually determined and modulated, some may be associative, as we saw with Kupka; hieroglyphs from the world.

The Shape of Rhapsody in Blue There must have been a picture of something in the composer’s mind. What it was nobody knows, often not even the composer. But music has a marvelous faculty of recording a picture in someone else’s mind. In my own case, everybody who has ever listened to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ – and that embraces thousands of people – has a story for it but myself.92

Rhapsody in Blue, the subject of these two paintings by Dove, holds an iconic status as a ‘bridge’ work between the jazz and classical music worlds. It was commissioned by Paul Whiteman with this explicit ambition in mind. Part of an enormous concert of twentysix pieces (including works by Confrey and Elgar), it was the only work to produce a synthesis. It was not just musical cross-fertilization and it had serious intent. As Schiff says, ‘the audience witnessed the birth of a new cultural sensibility’.93 Composed in less than five weeks, it was orchestrated by Whiteman’s pianist and arranger Ferde Grofé only eight days before the première, which took place on Tuesday, 12 February 1924, in

Orphism in America

173

the Aeolian Hall in New York. In the audience were Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Kreisler, Stokowski, Sousa and the jazz stride pianist Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith.94 The piano part, however, was incomplete and it was left to Gershwin to improvise sections in performance, with Grofé’s direction to Whiteman, ‘wait for the nod’ written in the score. The signature two-and-a-half-octave clarinet rising glissando at the opening also has to be credited to a moment of improvisation and to Whiteman’s clarinettist Ross Gorman.95

As written, it intends all the notes of the scale to be sounded, because the figure 17 is written above. However, Gorman changed it as a joke in rehearsal, exaggerating the final octave of the chromatic scale with the blur (or wail) of a rising glissando. Gershwin liked it so much he asked Gorman to repeat it in the performance, and it has become a performance convention ever since.96 Gershwin changed the works title from American Rhapsody to Rhapsody in Blue (for Jazz Band and Piano) on Ira Gershwin’s suggestion, following his interest in the way James McNeill Whistler constructed a dialogical relationship between his paintings’ titles and their subject-matter, often based around the example of music. Rhapsody in Blue’s ‘final’ form was not written down until after the first performance. However, even then it was re-orchestrated by Grofé two years after the first performance in 1926, and again in 1942 for full symphony orchestra upon its publication.97 The first, 1924 recording, and the later 1927 recording, speed up tempi and compress rubato, and significantly they cut the score by a third, in order to fit what is a c.15-minute work into 9 minutes, and onto the two sides of a 78rpm disc (the disc Dove used). Some years later, Leonard Bernstein, who had a life-long fascination with the piece, raised questions about its form in relation to the classical model: The ‘Rhapsody’ is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together. The themes are terrific, inspired, God-given. I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. But if you want to speak of a composer, that’s another matter. Your ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable. You can cut parts of it without affecting the whole. You can remove any of these stucktogether sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. It can be a fiveminute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact, all these things are being done to it every day. And it’s still the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.98

That parts of it were indeed cut, and others not written out for the first performance, underlines the fact that it does not adhere to the classical model that Bernstein recognized, it was a hybrid, a mix of jazz and concert music: As Schiff describes, ‘Although critics have accused Rhapsody of formlessness, it is polymorphous. It exists in many different forms, following divergent functions.’99 However, as Bernstein suggests, its ontological status is not affected by scoring and rescoring, which allows it almost to establish a quality as a species of ‘standard’. Indeed, Bernstein himself did a number of ‘arrangements’ of it.100

174

Improvision

The first recording was acoustic (without electrical amplification) and is the one Dove owned. The second, 1927, recording was electronic and the conductor was probably changed from Whiteman to Nathaniel Shilkret.101 It was a very successful record in commercial terms, being widely distributed, but no reliable sales figures exist from the time, making it hard to be precise about specific numbers sold. Although the figures were high, the boast that it was a million seller is probably an exaggeration, although as David Ewen claims ‘the royalties from the sale of sheet music, records, and other subsidiary rights gathered more than a quarter of a million dollars in a decade. The Rhapsody made Gershwin a rich man.’102 The issue of improvisation is, therefore, far from straightforward, as the tension between jazz and concert elements in Rhapsody in Blue demonstrate.103 It was not until Armstrong’s move to Chicago in late 1924 (to join the Fletcher Henderson Band), and Jelly Roll Morton’s arrival in New York in 1926, that improvisation came to the fore as a jazz characteristic. Although it had always been there, its ideological and expressive force was not recognized until the mid-1920s. The element of improvisation is not, of course, unique to jazz, but an ‘improvisationary’ style, and the opportunity for improvisation does sit more comfortably in early twentieth-century music with jazz, and alongside the polymorphous Rhapsody in Blue, than with the classical paradigm and the idea of the ‘work’. Benson concludes his phenomenological study of improvisation, mentioned above, by reminding us of the distinction between Rossini’s and Beethoven’s conceptions of music. The former, he tells us, ‘considered his pieces of music to have a changing identity that was closely connected to their incarnations in performance . . . On the other hand it was Beethoven who demanded that his pieces be taken as “works” that had certain inviolable boundaries.’104 While Beethoven’s conception became the dominant paradigm for the concept of absolute music, and classical music more generally (the processes outlined by Bernstein), Rossini’s view has retrospectively remained, Benson argues, closer to day-to-day musical practice (and Rhapsody in Blue), even when performers are guided by the ideology of Werktreue. This is to see music not as absolute, but as part of an inevitable shifting cultural dialogue. Benson concludes his study by quoting Stravinsky, who says something remarkably close to Duchamp in the latter’s ‘Creative Act’ quoted above. The Russian composer emphasizes how important the listener is ‘in the game initiated by the creator’, going on to say that the relationship is ‘nothing less, nothing more’ than a partnership. But if we take Roland Barthes’ extension of this idea towards the demise of the author, we follow Benton’s conclusion that the ‘game is defined neither by the composer nor by the performer nor by the listener’.105 The game belongs to all of the participants equally.

Translation To understand this process in the case of Dove’s improvisatory ‘translations’ of the jazz to which he listened, a short diversion via Derrida’s comments on the role of the translator may add depth to the notion of analogical movement. Derrida discusses the ideology of translation through engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay the ‘Task of the Translator’.106 There ‘the subject . . . finds him/herself

Orphism in America

175

immediately indebted by the existence of the original’.107 To be true to this approach, Derrida argues the translator must ‘neither reproduce, represent, nor copy the original, nor even . . . care about communicating the meaning of the original’. Instead, quoting Christie McDonald, Derrida points out that ‘the translator must assure the survival, which is to say the growth, of the original. Translation augments and modifies the original . . . This process – transforming the original as well as the translation – is the translation contract between the original and the translating text.’108 This is similar to what Dove did in his jazz paintings. Dove transformed the original into a visual dance focused on the hand, producing a work that condenses sound units into visual marks; musical gestures into painterly ones. He does not attempt to preserve the original, and there is no way back to it through his gestures. He is not reproducing music. Rather, in the process of ‘translating’ sounds into marks, Dove was making a new contribution to painting, not adding to the music qua sound (although there was undoubtedly a rhythmic and sonoric element to the act of painting). Sound freed him from a given grammar of marks. There is not a one-to-one ‘translation’ of marks for sounds, but an improvisation, a playing with an idea, a creative freedom. This idea of translation also relates in complex ways to the concept of rhythm. In his discussion of Derrida, Peter Dayan investigates the intimate relationship between rhythm and language function. Rhythm, like meaning, is not inherent but consequent: ‘The rhythm is structured by a certain relation of meaning to its other. But on the question of exactly what or where that structure might be, what material element it is inscribed in, and where its trace may be followed, Derrida says nothing.’ Dayan concludes, ‘Indeed, it would seem that here is the very limit of the possibility of saying.’109 In this way, music represents for Derrida the paradigm case of abstraction in art (in general), marking the limits of discourse, what Derrida calls the unknowable ‘trace’.110 This does not mean you cannot talk about music and meaning, but that meaning in music is unsayable. Music for Derrida, Dayan argues, has ventriloquial force. What writing must lose to become music is its exchange value (the ‘subject’). The same is true for Dove’s abstraction; music translated to painting cannot simply be translated into language. While for Derrida writing can allow the structures of subjectivity to be seen and analysed (it is a self-possessed language), music is the remainder after the subject is consumed. The power of music lies in the fact that it is itself a translation of an inaccessible language, which is an idea with a long and significant history.111 Therefore, translation into it (or, in the case of Dove, out of it) cannot be judged ‘because one cannot calculate the equivalence between source and target languages’. Dayan concludes,‘Perhaps the peculiar membrane around music that allows it to be perceived as translation, but forbids any economic analysis of that translation, is that which allows music, or even art in general, to exist.’112 Dove allows his translation to remain inside art. He in turn remained true to the spirit of jazz by augmenting and modifying the original marks, riffing on patterns as visual marks; that is a part of ‘the translation contract between the original and the translating text’. One of Dove’s most careful interpreters, Rachel DeLue, points out, ‘Quick-seeming and all over brush work engenders a sense of improvisation in each of the canvases . . . something Dove probably associated with jazz even if the recordings were not

176

Improvision

themselves the products of improvisation.’113 The idea of a hard border between improvisation and composition should nevertheless be resisted, as Benson argued. While these images are not sui generis, the music did give Dove ‘permission’ to ‘take lines for a walk’. The status of the jazz Dove listened to, in relation to the concept of improvisation, has been considered in relation to Rhapsody in Blue, but a few concluding remarks via a more contemporary jazz performer, Vijay Iyer, are in order: What are we referring to when we use the word ‘improvisation’? The term is used in innumerable ways, but always with the implicit assumption that there are acts that are improvised and acts that are not, and that those two kinds of acts are distinguishable. Two main aspects of that class of acts we call ‘improvised’ seem to be (1) a real-time process of making choices and acting on them, and (2) the sense of temporal embeddedness: the fact that these actions take time, and that the time taken matters. With this understanding, we might take improvisation to denote that semi-transparent, multi-stage process through which we sense, perceive, think, decide, and act in real time. But when construed this broadly, improvisation seems to encompass most of our behaviour . . . What we seem to be doing, instead of literally identifying improvisation according to some intrinsic attribute, is allowing cultural and contextual factors to regulate the presence or absence of improvisation. To attend a play or a narrative film or a symphony, for example, is to witness what one knows to be a series of carefully scripted and sculpted human actions, while to watch emcees in a street corner ‘cipher’, to hear a performance of Hindustani classical music, or to attend an ‘improv comedy’ event or a jazz club is to knowingly witness individual and collective acts of improvisation, and to parse them in those terms.114

Context and the role of the listener is key. Whiteman’s jazz is usually contrasted to ‘hot’ jazz, especially the jazz recorded by Armstrong’s Hot Five and Seven groups in their sessions between 1925 and 1928.115 It is true that Whiteman did not have the same concern or facility with improvisation as Armstrong had, but nor did Whiteman’s audience, who had no mechanism to comprehend ‘real-time composition’ in contrast to ‘composition’. But to call one jazz and the other not is to essentialize the concept too restrictively. While Armstrong’s prodigious musicianship and creative flare are fundamental to the development of jazz, Whiteman’s role in pulling debates about modernism and jazz together is also extremely significant. The commissioning of Gershwin to write symphonic jazz as ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’ was, as Jed Rasula has pointed out, ‘central to the intersection of jazz with modernism’.116 It is therefore entirely appropriate that Dove should choose Rhapsody in Blue as a vehicle for his experiments in abstraction. Such an ‘intersection between jazz and modernism’ is entirely appropriate for an artist modulating the Orphic impulse in art, trafficking between different ‘conditions of music’. But the significance is deeper than simply the equation of Gershwin’s music with jazz and modernism. What painting to such music offered Dove was the opportunity to develop painterly improvisation. The issue here is the opportunity afforded by ‘going

Orphism in America

177

with the flow’ of the music. Iyer again, in relation to embodied cognition and improvisation, says in the conclusion of the above quoted article: Music is born of our actions – its ingredients are the sound of bodies in motion – and therefore music cognition begins as action understanding. This does not mean that we cannot process musical information without bodies, but it does mean that our sensations and actions provide the context for abstraction, symbolic music cognition, and the fantasies brought about by music-withoutbodies.117

The same description fits Dove’s practice of painting to recorded music. His was an engagement with both the analysis of music as operational action in the visual realm, and as a phenomenology of enacted sound technology.

Gramophone records The phonograph (in Dove’s case the Victrola)118 fundamentally shifted musical experience, dislocating it from the bodies of the performers and their instruments in specific sites, and shifting it to the bodies of the listeners and their machines, often in the new site of the home.119 So, this new technology did not ‘disembody’ music, as is sometimes erroneously assumed (thus seeing it as the acme of absolute music).120 In practice what happened was that one physical materiality was replaced with another. As DeLue has perceptively summarized, in order for Dove to paint from records he ‘had to interact with and activate two objects, the phonograph and the phonograph disc’.121Thus the use of recordings adds to the physicality of painting, despite the rhetoric of ‘disembodied sound’ that surrounds the discourse of musicalist art. The sound recording also produces a significant visual product: the ‘spiral scratch’, the groove created by the vibration of sound that then produces an indentation of varied depth according to the rate of vibration. During playback the sound is amplified by a horn, but so is any surface ‘interference’ (dust, dirt, etc). Thus, records always produce two sources of sound: the dominant music or voice, the intended sound, and the secondary (background) sound of the playback technology itself, the surface sound. These sounds are made from a spiral, unfolding line, and were then translated back into lines by Dove. Many of these music paintings show, as we saw, looped or wavy lines which could as well ‘represent’ the physical makeup of the recording technology as a melodic phrase; as much the spiral scratch as the sound of music. Rachel DeLue reports from evidence in his and his wife’s diaries, that Dove listened to such recordings in social settings, with others and especially with his wife, the painter Helen S. Torr (1886–1967), whom he called ‘Reds’. They received records as gifts and, ‘sometimes Dove and Torr painted together as the records played’.122 It is worth mentioning that this practice may also have been significant for Torr’s development as an artist, as 1927 also marked a move towards a more modernist aesthetic in her own painting.123 Recordings and radio, DeLue says, appealed to Dove because he saw it as a modern form of interaction and connectivity, records were physical objects of significance, not simply carriers of sound.

178

Improvision

The interest in music, jazz music especially, and the etiquettes associated with recorded music, provoke a much more complicated picture than the relatively simple idea of ‘painting music’. Instead, what is going on here is a multiple and complex set of ‘translations’. Not just translation from record to painting, but translations within recording technology itself; translating the experience of jazz, fixing it to an object (a record) and sealing it from relative variation, but at the same time allowing it to be endlessly repeated and studied. Records and their players allow repetition, transportation and interaction with sound in new and unexpected ways. They enable music in social situations outside the sites of production and live consumption (including individual, solitary consumption). They involve multiple and complex new interactions between a host of individuals (musicians, engineers, shellac producers, phonograph manufacturers, graphic designers, salespeople, transporters, retailers, listeners, etc.) and between a range of technologies (instruments, phonographs, records, etc.). The ‘translation’ of music on records into abstracted painted marks is then determined by another set of technologies (paint, brushes, canvas, etc.), and when performed in real time involve both a physical interaction with the act of painting and with the music reproduction (turning over the 78-rpm disc every 3 or 4 minutes – the average length of a side, putting the needle on the record, winding the crank, picking up the brush, etc.)124 and then ‘checking’ the translation of marks from sound to sight and then back again. As Jeff Titon points out in relation to this technology, ‘Frequent interruptions to change records focussed the listeners’ attention on the mechanics of playing records [rather than] a live performance.’125 Dove played the records ‘over and over again on his phonograph while making his pictures, consciously experimenting to see what effect this would have on his work’.126 He wrote: ‘The line is the result of reducing dimension from the solid to the plane to the point. A moving point can follow a waterfall and dance’.127 It can also follow a melody or a groove. Such statements explicitly echo those of Kandinsky (especially his 1926 text Punkt und Linie zu Fläche) and explore the aesthetics of the line in ways similar to both Kupka and Klee. Dove also indicated that this engagement with jazz was to ‘modernize’ painting, to make it specifically modern: ‘The music things were done to speed the line up to the pace at which we live to-day.’128 This modernity was equated with both jazz and America. This was true for Europeans and for Americans, as Dove put it: What constitutes American painting? When a man paints the El, a 1740 house or a miner’s shack, he is likely to be called by the critics, American. These things may be American, but it’s what is in an artist that counts. What do we call ‘American’ outside painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change. Well then a painter may put all these qualities in a still life or an abstraction, and be going more native than another who sits quietly copying skyscrapers.129

This may be a comment or critique in the direction of Thomas Hart Benton and the realists,130 but inventiveness, speed and change describe jazz at this time as much as abstracted modernity. As he later said, in words that echo his debt to Kandinsky, ‘The

Orphism in America

179

choice of form was reduced from the plane to the line . . . The line was the only thing that had speed enough . . . I am at present trying to put down the spirit of the idea as it comes out. To sense the ‘pitch’ of an idea as one would a bell.’131 That is the speed to translate in real time from sound to sight, to improvise to grooves and from grooves. Kandinsky expressed a related idea of linear movement arrested, in his Concerning the Spiritual: If, in considering an example of melodic composition [what he describes as ‘simple composition . . . regulated according to an obvious and simple form’], one forgets the material aspect and probes down into the artistic reason of the whole, one finds primitive geometrical forms or an arrangement of simple lines which help towards a common motion. This common motion is echoed by various sections and may be varied by a single line or form. Such isolated variations serve different purposes. For instance, they may act as a sudden check, or to use a musical term, a ‘fermata.’132

It should be added that Dove, no more than Picabia or Kupka, thought simply in terms of a representation of a specific jazz piece (even when the paintings reflect it in their titles). What all three were strongly drawn to (and I choose the word carefully) was the more holistic impact of jazz; its musicality, its modernity, mechanical resonances, liveliness, rhythmic innovation, energy, spontaneity, and the alternative ideology it offered. Music is an art of resonance and it was the fullness of that resonance that drew abstractionists to the possibilities of re-presentation, and to the integrity of the translation. And as DeLue has argued, the change in listening habits that followed the development of recording technologies are a part of this. None of the artists discussed were interested in simply illustrating jazz or music in their art. Rather they were concerned with the complex processes of translation (analogy and affinities) that might be sought between what they were attempting to develop as an abstract visual language, and music. Dove, more than many, seems attuned to the physicality of jazz and the processes of modern reproductive music technology. This is what Harry Cooper has called Dove’s interest in ‘registration’ rather than ‘illustration’. DeLue suggested that although Dove often used the word ‘illustration’ disparagingly (dismissing the work of Hart Benton and Grant Wood as ‘huge colored illustrations’, for example, he had also worked as an illustrator, and had, by 1920, achieved a balance between illustration on the one hand and abstraction on the other.133 It is also possible, to continue Cooper’s point, that Dove called his more radical abstracts ‘illustrations’ as a way of ‘explaining’ their ‘content’. Abstraction carried with it a fear that such images would be de facto meaningless because they appeared ‘contentless’ (Gegenstandslose to use the German term). To counter this Kandinsky appealed to what he described as ‘inner necessity’.134 Abstraction moved from natural symbols (or symbols grounded in the world) to intuitive symbols. It is here that music acted to substitute referential symbols for (seemingly) non-referential, subjectively expressive ones. What Dove seems to be proposing is that recordings (or the radio) help the ‘translation’ of music into abstract mark making, in an equivalent way to that of ‘illustration’ translating magazine text (for example) into visual images.

180

Improvision

With the manufacture of these paintings Dove was involved in an improvisational activity. I mentioned above the literal representation of the groove of the record, the spiral scratch, and it is no accident that improvisation and groove have a very close etymological link in jazz. To ‘get in the groove’ is to be ‘lost in the music’.135 Dove translated in the groove, and his paintings allowed him to get lost in the music.

Groove and swing Groove is a complex musical concept that has been the subject of recent musicological interest,136 and in this context it might helpfully be thought of as a near synonym for the older and earlier jazz concept of ‘swing’. By groove I do not simply mean an isochronous pulse, but rather a phenomenologically sensed tension within the flow of musical time. As Tiger Roholt has argued, it needs to be understood as felt, phenomenologically understood, not just analysable objectively. It is hard to comprehend out of its context, out of the flow of time as Bergson might have put it. Indeed, Dove was interested in Bergson’s ideas, especially about temporality (space and time). He later revisited this interest in a letter to Stieglitz, explaining that his 1942 painting, The Inn,137 was in 2/4 time, and that timing in painting was ‘comparable to music but not the same. It is coming out of space rather than drawing ‘From the eye back’, which is still a relic. It can come as a thought, a form, a sensation.’138 Groove is not just an issue of temporal rhythm, but also of dynamics, timbre, harmony and their interaction. In this way it is not simply rhythmic, although it is registered in time, it can also be affected, and enacted, by the flow and tensions of harmony and contrasting timbral effects. This type of rhythmic nuance, common in the swing or groove of jazz, but by no means exclusive to it, is most often manifested by musicians playing certain notes in slight anticipation of the beat, others slightly behind the beat, pushing and pulling the tempo, ‘leaning’ in to the note and playing ‘laid back’. The overall tempo of the piece can also govern the effect of groove (this is how Monson discusses it139) and in this regard musicians also often invoke the idea of ‘feeling’ as equivalent to being ‘in the groove’; it is something you have a ‘feel’ for, something you experience in your body. A significant aspect of music’s role in leading abstraction in art, and especially the model of jazz, is the visual consequence of ‘being in the groove’ in music (this is an issue I shall return to in relation to Fabienne Verdier in the next chapter). Being in the groove often has a look. The absorption in the musical moment, especially in the process of improvising, often produces a physical surplus that ‘leaks’ out into facial or bodily gesture. Musicologist Laurence Kramer addressed this issue in a different context in relation to Liszt and the emergence of the public virtuoso. His phrase the ‘listening gaze’ is especially useful and pertinent in relation to jazz: ‘For some listeners, Liszt’s facial rhetoric seems to have produced a kind of listening gaze to which it revealed new modes of musical response, new forms of musical meaning.’140 The look of the performer provides clues to the listener as to the interior experience of the performer. In the case of jazz musicians (and especially black musicians) the physical deportment of the performing and improvising body was/is often seen as a mirror of interior

Orphism in America

181

emotional states. The ‘exaggerated’ gestures of performing black jazz musicians were often, as we have seen, the subject of satire, as physical excess was regarded as ‘uncivilized’. In many cases this was simple racism, but in some it was a misreading of emotional expression. Caricature demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the emerging physiological etiquette that characterized absorption in the ‘swing’ of improvisation, a necessary corollary of concentration. The main point is not the physiological veracity of this as an idea: an expression = an interior state. It is more important that this is how the audience is likely to interpret such physical excess. We tend to read the body and facial expressions of the performer as registering, in visual form, the interior creation and expression of musical ideas. The process of improvisation, real time composing, is not notated, but written out on the face and body. As Peter Elsdon has pointed out in his study of the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, ‘These intrusions are seen to form not some kind of physical analogue to the music, but a complex embodiment of the mental effort involved in improvisation. The gaze works to interpret these physical movements, seeing them both as bodily imaginings of the music, and as responses to the music as it takes sounding form.’141Music is not just heard, it is seen, and musical meaning is threaded into the physical enactment of music-making.142 In the case of Dove, things are obviously a little different. He is not re-inscribing or translating the gestures of improvising performers into a syntax of painterly markmaking. Instead, Dove’s painterly enactment is via a recorded medium. So, his artistic gestures provided a re-embodiment of the gestures of the musicians and took cognizance of the technology that delivered the music. There are visual and physical consequences to ‘being in the groove’, but there is also a felt response on the part of the listener. This might obviously manifest itself in toetapping, finger-clicking, etc, but more subtly and fundamentally, it is also internally experienced. Roholt employs Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘motor intentionality’ as a way of allowing the body to understand that which is missed in objective analysis. He makes the point that to attend analytically to the ‘displacement’ of rhythmic emphasis – in front or behind the beat – is simply to record its deviation from the supposed norm. And in doing this it fundamentally fails to grasp the essence of groove. A semiquaver + 3 or a semi-quaver − 2, etc., analysed as such, only registers that the note is late or early and by how much. What it fails to capture is the experience of the movement in context. Such analysis is not what performers do. They feel the musical impulse. Nuance of timing is part of an overall performance that involves all the musical parameters (timbre, harmony, texture, etc.) and often in response to other improvising musicians. To clarify, Merleau-Ponty explains this in relation to looking at a painting in an art gallery. Roholt: ‘One of Merleau-Ponty’s examples is very instructive: when I view a painting in an art gallery I experience a bodily disequilibrium, a bodily tension, that guides me in moving forwards or backwards to an optimal viewing distance, at which point I feel a bodily equilibrium.’143 Thus the ‘understanding’ (especially pertinent in an art context), or perhaps ‘tuningin-to’ a groove, is not a matter of intellectual understanding, a cognitive comprehension of propositions or concepts, it is understood by feeling it: ‘Understanding a groove

182

Improvision

means to feel the qualitative relationships among the elements of the rhythm in one’s body.’144 Ontologically, this is problematic for a conception of music based in a fixed notion of a ‘work’. Musical works are arrested in scores. Groove or swing is not visible in the score (if there is one), but in the enactment of performance and the interaction between performers. Of course, all music, irrespective of classification, requires interpretation to produce qualitive engagement with the score. The question is more, therefore, one of emphasis and address. Listening, as well as performing music, is an embodied aesthetic experience, and as such demands an understanding in and through the body. Painting and seeing, as Merleau-Ponty suggests above, are also experienced and made through the body. This physical dimension has a special significance in the context of gestural abstraction, where the body of the viewer ‘tunes-in’ to the image in much the same way as the body feels a groove. What is remarkable about Dove’s record paintings is that they begin to develop this species of motor-intentionality and discover it through abstract mark-making in the face of jazz sounds. We have looked at Kupka’s paintings of the machinery of sound reproduction, his Jazz Hot containing elements that resemble machine parts; No.1 has angular elements that could be a crank handle with a horn shape and with many disclike elements. The presence of this new technology was not unique to Dove, but his engagement with the physical action of ‘playing’ music on a gramophone was. DeLue even suggests that the inclusion of metallic paint in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II , I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise and Orange Groove in California, and a metal clock spring in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I establish a continuum between the paintings and the phonograph apparatus, in order to invoke the painting’s reference to music. This establishes an equivalency between two forms of technology and two mediums of translation (canvas, brushes, paint: turntable, needle and horn), so that the works cannot be simplistically thought of as illustrations.’145 Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, with its unwound clock-spring, is not the only time Dove included ‘extra’ materials in his works. In his assemblages and collages from 1924 to 1930 he often refashioned found objects into inventive landscapes and portraits. Like Picabia, he also produced a ‘camera’ portrait of Stieglitz, for example, but in his case, not a deflated bellows illustration, but a collage of a photographic plate with clock and watch springs and steel wool on carboard, topped off with a camera lens. While these works might be seen as part of a Dadaist expansion of artistic material, Dada’s nihilistic and critical spirit is entirely absent. These machine works are closer to Dove’s more painterly abstracts than Dada. For example, Dove’s 1922 work Lantern, which includes silver paint and appears to be a ‘portrait’ of a Coleman arc lantern, is not dissimilar from the machine images of Duchamp, his portraits of chocolate grinders. Here, though, Dove’s focus is abstract beauty rather than parody, incongruity or surrealism. His painting is of nineteenth-century technology in this case, but in the background of the painting it is not hard to see, for want of another line, music manuscript paper. This musical reference was not missed by the American jazz bassist Greg Cohen, whose 1997 album ‘Moment to Moment’ features a cropped image of Dove’s painting, that makes it look as much like a bass drum and pedal, as it does the two glowing mantles of the lantern. While Dove’s painting process raises significant questions for the emergence of abstract painting and musicality, he also utilised the radio in ways similar to the

Orphism in America

183

Figure 4.14 Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, 45.72 × 66.04 cm. Collection of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, FA 1954.1.

phonograph, producing at least two (lunar) paintings based on music he heard on the radio: The Moon Was Laughing at Me and Me and the Moon (both c.1937). His painting Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) (1938) may also have been painted from the radio, rather than from records.146 Dove’s interest in the visual record or translation of sound can also be seen most notably in Fog Horns (1929) (Figure 4.14). In this painting, a number of key themes in Dove’s work coexist. The visualization of sound (and, in his words, ‘the reality of sensation’), the weather and natural forces exist in a literal liminal space on the shore of Long Island Sound, where his boat The Mona was moored; a threshold space intensified by fog, obscuring vision so sound becomes more tangible. There are three sounds (and a more distant echo?) that, unlike putting a needle to a record, or turning a radio on, issue forth independent of the artist, and the sound is thus more ‘pure’ than the record painting, like budding flowers or ripples in water, the sensation transcribed synaesthetically, but not made by a synesthete. The interest in making sound visually tangible also finds evidence in his small but significant output of assemblages and their use of found objects. In the same years as his record paintings, Dove made a series of around twenty-four assemblages (or collages). The metal clock-spring in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I links these two genres. Such assemblage works are between media, as his music paintings were between sight and sound. Here ambiguity oscillates between formal qualities, such as the depiction of pictorial space, and the signifying status of signs. This is common in the genre of collage, where found objects can simultaneously stand both for themselves and other

184

Improvision

objects – twigs as full trees, newspaper scraps as complete newspaper, etc. Much has been said of these assemblages in relation to influence, especially in relation to cubism, folk art, Picabia, and their later influence on Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg. Here I only wish to make a point about the linkage of machines and the handmade; sight, sound and the haptic. These assemblages are also records of process, but not like the record paintings. Rather, they are collections of disparate materials which ‘record, diary-like, Dove’s habits of looking, finding and gathering’.147 The scrap of music (part of the song by Robert Lowery (1864) ‘Shall We Gather at the River’) included at the foot of the assemblage Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924), refers to the act of baptism, but also rhymes to the artist’s gathering of material to himself on his boat on the river, readymades to reactivate. The assemblage Hand Sewing Machine (1927) is emblematic of weaving those elements together.148 Through these works we return to the machine, but as a device that Dove most often thought of as mediated by hand: the sewing machine, the phonograph, the sights and sounds of machines touched. Dove’s ‘record paintings’ is a remarkable series. Through it, what he grasped more effectively than many other artists, was the irony that musical abstraction was deeply grounded in the materiality of technology.

‘Gramophoning’: materiality and meaning We can pursue the sights and sounds of this materiality a little further. One of the central questions faced by abstract artists in the first decades of the twentieth century was a question of the power of the sign and its address to signification. In Kandinsky’s words, ‘what is to replace the missing object?’149 Painting’s quest within the ideology of abstraction was often to seek out the particularity of its material and strive for direct expression, felt or intuitive. Kandinsky believed this was a matter of allowing the material to speak, as much as possible, for itself. ‘The artist must not forget . . . that each of his materials conceals within itself the way in which it should be used.’150 It is therefore for him a matter of liberating this ‘inner life’ of the material, an ideology that resonates with Michelangelo’s famous, if perhaps unverifiable, statement regarding the materiality of sculpture: ‘In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.’151 The musical model, the condition to which art aspires, sits in a complex relation to this idea of materiality, evident in Kandinsky’s writings. Following the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment, in Cartesian terms, music, like the mind, had been separated from the body. As Daniel Chua has laconically put it ‘although sound resided in the body, the body itself could not validate musical meaning, since the thinking ego had basically mechanized it to death.’ The only way music could re-engage a rational presence was through the voice and word.152 By the time we get to the generation immediately prior to Kandinsky and Dove, we arrive, with Hanslick, at the idea of ‘pure’ music. By this he means a music in which its content is its form. The composer thinks and constructs purely in tone: tone is the

Orphism in America

185

cultural refinement of sound, sound exists in nature, tone only in music. Music now has content, but that content is not translatable through words, it speaks only in tones. In this Hanslick is following, as I discussed in Eye hEar, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s musicology, which declares that to speak of music is to speak of it as an autonomous art, and thus of instrumental music, because this is furthest from any mixture with other arts (especially poetry). This is the line of reasoning that underlies Pater’s declaration that all arts should aspire to the same condition. This is the refined version of music that is most often invoked in relation to abstraction, a music that is positioned as the least material of the arts. With jazz music comes a new materiality, a modernist materiality. Jazz is material, to adopt contemporary critical terms, because it is less ‘refined’ and because it bypasses the mind to affect the body directly. This is, of course, wrong and misunderstands the nature of improvisation as embodied knowledge, created by mind and body together, and its critical focus is almost entirely on reception rather than conception (about which it knew little). Nevertheless, jazz was at the forefront of new cultures of listening and dancing. Further, its reception was reconceived and shifted by the machines of music (phonographs, records, etc.), a type of listening that fluctuates with domestic distractions, that involved regular interaction with these machines, that might encourage dancing and allowed endless repeatability. This materiality was evident even before sounds came forth. As Mark Katz puts it, Before even setting needle to groove, the operator of the phonograph . . . encountered one of the most remarkable characteristics of recorded sound: its tangibility. Taking the disc out of its paper sleeve, he held the frozen sounds in his hands, felt the heft of the shellac, saw the play of light on the disc’s lined, black surface. He was holding a radically new type of musical object, for whereas scores prescribed or described music, and instruments generate music, recordings preserve actual sounds.’153

This separates the music from the producer and the body of the performer and their instruments, but it replaces it, as noted before, with other objects and modes of exchange. It is also worth noting that the very record label (and later the sleeve) provided opportunities to add visual material to the experience of listening. Patrick Coleman has perceptively pointed out that the recordings that Dove owned were on the Victor label, which bears the famous logo based on the painting by artist Francis Barraud (1856–1924) called ‘His Master’s Voice’ of 1899, of the dog Nipper listening to a cylinder phonograph (exclusively manufactured by the Edison Bell company for Britain).154 Supposedly hearing the realism of his disembodied master’s voice, he cocks his head on one side to focus the sound. This aspiration to realism was key to the concept of hifidelity as it emerged in early recording technology, here made visible. One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence for attempts to address the developing etiquette in phonograph listening was presented in 1916 with the ‘Edison Realism Test’. This was a set of instructions printed on a broadside, which you might have been handed in the early part of the century in your local record store. There were

186

Improvision

six instructions, the results of which were then explained in the closing paragraph. It read as follows.155

Edison Realism Test 1. State what kind of voice (soprano, tenor, etc.) or kind of musical instrument you wish to hear. 2. Sit with your back to the instrument. 3. Spend two minutes looking through the scrapbook which will be handed to you by the demonstrator. 4. Then select one of the clippings at random and read it carefully. 5. Having read the clipping, recall the last time you heard the kind of voice or instrument which you have asked to hear. Picture the scene. When it is clearly in your mind, say to the demonstrator, “I am ready.” 6. About forty-five seconds after the music begins, close your eyes and keep them closed for a minute or more. Then open your eyes for fifteen seconds but do not gaze at your surroundings. After this, close your eyes again and keep them closed until the end of the selection.

Result You should get the same emotional reaction experienced when you last heard the same kind of voice or instrument. If you do not obtain this reaction at the first test, it is due to the fact that you have not wholly shaken off the influence of your surroundings. In that case you should repeat the test until you are no longer influenced by your surroundings.

A number of points are worthy of note from this remarkable document. For the current discussion, perhaps the most significant is how important the visual dimension of listening is. This is not new and was fundamental to the Romantic imagination, most tellingly described by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder in the guise of Joseph Berlinger, the hero of the novella Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796). The character’s experience of music always promoted visions: ‘All these manifold sensations always brought forth corresponding sensual images and new thoughts in his soul: – wonderful gift of music156 But in the Edison test the ‘realism’ of the music is achieved by imagining and recalling a more prosaic image, to ‘see’ an absent space or event or performance, by ‘picturing the scene’ and presumably holding it in the mind while listening. What many abstract painters did was to answer this realist test in their own terms. In aspiring to the condition of music they also employed the power of music to create sights linked to emotional reactions. Mark Katz also points out that as early as 1905 audio-visual machines were being developed to find a way of compensating for the loss of a visual dimension in recording (beyond the label and sleeve). ‘The Stereophone’ and the ‘Illustrated Song Machine’

Orphism in America

187

were both cylinder-playing phonographs that rotated images in time with the music. The Illustrated Song Machine ‘is just what the public has wanted since the first automatic machine [the phonograph] was placed on the market, and the listener drew a mind’s picture as the words and music were repeated to him’.157 Of course, the provision of images can constrict as much as it can supplement, and soon LP images, film and video would meet this need, but it would be a profound mistake to assume that music is ever invisible.158 While new technology shifted the relationship between the performer and their audience, between what could be seen and what not, what was present and what absent, a space is always left to imagine; and this was as important to new ‘listeners’ as it was to Joseph Berlinger. As one early commentator put it, the home is now a concert or dance hall where ‘the best orchestras in the world, Paul Whiteman’s, Art Hickman’s, [Zez] Confrey’s, and [Frank] McKee’s are on call with their sweeping, caressing, imperative music that will not be denied until every foot is tapping and everybody swaying with the rhythm’. The same writer goes on, in relation to other types of music, that Wagner’s ‘Fire Music’ finds new meanings and new images when accompanied by the ‘first open fire of the season on the hearth of the home you have set to music’, or, even better, when ‘tried out of doors, with a portable phonograph and a campfire’.159 New sights and sites replaced the absence of the performers. Although the phonograph could be used to entertain family and friends, its ‘removal’ of music from performers, and the opportunity to listen to music alone, were also seen as problematic. An early commentator, Orlo Williams, wrote in the British publication Gramophone, the world’s first record magazine, in the year it was founded (1923), that while ‘it may be assumed in these days that nearly everyone has a gramophone, there is some point in speculating a little upon the morals and decencies [of] gramophoning’. He goes on to consider the appropriate time of day for ‘gramophoning’ and warns that music at breakfast may ‘touch one of the ingrained superstitions of the Englishman, that music . . . is not decent at such an early hour of the day’. It was not only that when you listened had moral implications: more significantly for Williams was the danger of being carried away in the act of listening. ‘I fear that if I were discovered listening to the Fifth Symphony without a chaperone to guarantee my sanity, my friends would fall away with grievous shaking of the head.’ What all this makes clear is that the gramophone offered a radical new mode for consuming music; anytime, anyplace and with any company or none (the sexual overtone pushes home the moral implications of gramophoning). ‘Two persons, I admit, is the ideal number . . . People . . . should not do things “to themselves”, however much they may enjoy doing them in company’. The marvellous tongue in cheek nature of the text underlines the novelty of these new modes of listening.160 Through this new technology, as Dove and Kupka acknowledged in their paintings, music became a new kind of thing, a domestic thing, a thing you could hold in your hand, could play repeatedly, and on any site. The ‘thingness’ of music matched that of painting. Music was now not just ephemeral and spiritual, it was also physical and material, and one set of characteristics did not necessarily exclude the other. Music could be both spiritually moving and materially present, not least in the expressive gestures of paint. Its abstraction had been made ‘real’, and in this way it became an even more potent paradigm for art.

188

Improvision

Part 3: Rhythm Willard Huntington Wright Willard Huntington Wright, the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, is remembered as an apologist for Synchronism. His ideas embraced another stimulating cross-section of concepts deployed to support artistic modulation towards abstraction: the centrality of gesture, the association of marks with bodily movements and rhythm, and most notably his interest in Chinese art theory, whose relationship to rhythm will soon be discussed. Wright’s most important theoretical work was Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, published in New York in 1915. He understood modern art’s interest in such gestural marks as linked to the large body-rhythms of Michelangelo’s work. In his book Modern Painting, Wright writes, ‘every realization of aesthetic movement or the rhythm of form is based on the movement of the human body’.161 Wright was an art critic and novelist, who through his association with Synchronism was naturally drawn to the musical paradigm.162 In the process of his argument, he bypasses Orphism and instead settles on Synchronism as the movement that generated the modulation from Cubism to a musicalist- inspired abstraction.163 In dismissing Orphism,Wright saw Synchronism as surpassing it. He summarizes the Synchronists’ (by which he means his brother, Macdonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell) attack on Orphism: In their two specifically worded prospectuses they devoted much space to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in vogue; and although their criticisms of that school, coupled with the statement of their own tangible and logical aims, has much to do with Orphism’s demise, the impropriety of the attack created a feeling antagonistic to the new men. The appearance of their pictures was essentially different from any paintings hitherto exposed; and their conception, while being a normal and direct outgrowth of Cézanne, marked a revolution in formal construction. The inspiration of both these new artists was classic in that they recognised the absolute need of organisation which, if it was not melodiously and sequentially composed, should at least be rhythmic. Both were striving to create a pure art – one which would express itself with the means alone inherent to that art, as music expresses itself by means of circumscribed sound.164

Orphism and Synchronism are both part of the Orphic impulse, utilizing the model of music in fundamental ways. It was not just Wright’s art-historical writings that are relevant, for they show how contested the terms for Orphic art were at this time. Wright’s work as a novelist of detective fiction, under the pen name ‘S. S. Van Dine’, whose popular hero Philo Vance, with his mix of dilettantism and intellectual bent, was fashioned on the author’s own character, was also read by Dove. Among the novels he read was The Bishop Murder Case, in which the hero, Vance, characterizes the novel’s villain as both ‘asocial’ and ‘abstracted’, suffering from ‘pathological individualism’, a concept he ascribes to

Orphism in America

189

Einstein. This is in a chapter called ‘Mathematics and Murder’, which includes a discussion of contemporary mathematical ideas, theoretical physics and non-Euclidean geometry; ideas of influence on both cubist and post-cubist artists. Dove himself, as DeLue points out, supported a commitment to sociability, and on these terms rejected the term ‘abstraction’ to describe his work. He preferred positive terms such as ‘extraction’ or ‘formation’. He saw the concept of abstraction in much the same way that Schoenberg saw the idea of atonality; negatively. Engagement in the activities of life was a necessary and unavoidable aim of art, Dove believed. His interest in jazz, the technology of music, and the incorporation of materials in his assemblages, emphasizes this commitment to the stuff of the world, the importance of ‘forming’ as a process, rather than just a formalist interest in form (a position he shares with Paul Klee). As Dove writes: ‘As the point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves it becomes a plane, as the plane moves it becomes a solid, as the solid moves, it becomes life and as life moves, it becomes the present.’165 Dove’s reformulation of Kandinsky’s idea of point-to-line-to-plane make this clear, as does his interest in series paintings, like the record paintings. Wright saw painting as in crisis and he writes at length about this in his later book, The Future of Painting, published a few years before Dove’s record paintings in 1923. Here Wright developed his discussion of colour as an independent expressive medium and proposes a more radical historical development. He argues for an imminent break between ‘the art of painting’ and what he calls ‘the art of colour’. He saw this as the difference between ‘academic’ and ‘modernist’ painting, a formulation we might see as a modern restructuring of the disegno and colore paragone. His chronology characterizes this as a move from line to colour. ‘All forms and rhythms were conceived and expressed in drawing; and all volumes and tones . . . were produced by the scale of greys . . . the most profound problems presented by these pictures were solved by line and blackand-white masses.’166 The culmination of his argument lies in a future art of pure colour, to be found in the true synthesis of art and music, in the guise of colourinstruments. Superior to those of Alexander Rimington,167 the nineteenth-century inventor of the colour organ, this new art will find a foundation in the principles of composition that Wright regards as ‘based on the deepest physiological and intellectual needs of mankind. The fundamental relationship between the various arts, will also exist between the older arts and the new art of colour.’ This new paragone is to culminate in a total synthesis, an affinity across the arts and one built specifically on the canons of artistic creation first formulated in ancient China. As he writes, ‘The canons of art formulated by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century, as recorded by Fenollosa, embody not only the philosophy of Chinese art, but that of all great art. [The most important of which is]: (1) Rhythmic vitality: the life-movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things.’168 He suggests, where this was first ‘stated in line’, so the new art will state it in colour; rhythm in line and colour. While painting will continue, for Wright the future of art more truly lies in the ‘art of colour’: ‘But the art of color will be for occasional reactions and stimulation, like symphony concerts and the drama.’169 Although Wright thought in terms of concert music, the more potent and prominent model for the revivification of art through rhythm, in modernist terms, was jazz.

190

Improvision

A rhythmic synaesthetic diversion (via China and Greece) Leading on from Wright’s argument it is worth pausing (or resting?) on the concept of rhythm a little longer. It has been discussed before in this book and is intimate with the discussion of groove and swing, but while it is often assumed to be a co-opted concept in art, there is evidence to suggest that the movement may have been in the opposite direction. In either case, the principle point here is not so much one of genesis as the recognition of rhythm’s perception as synaesthetic. That is, it is experienced across sensory modalities and embodied when seen or heard. Rhythm is rooted in the body and through the body. What Dove’s record paintings attempted to do, was to articulate the experience of ‘feeling’ jazz rhythms in sight. Within art the concept of rhythm operates in broadly two ways. It exists at the macro level of composition and structure, in terms of overall pictorial organization and subject matter (Mondrian’s principal interest), and on the more micro level of gesture and individual mark-making, at the level of the brush stroke or pencil line. It is the latter that is most relevant for Kandinsky and to Dove’s ambition in his record paintings. Let us start with Wright’s invocation of early Chinese art theory and the ideas of Hsieh Ho (rendered here as Xie He from 䅍䎛). Wright was by no means alone in linking rhythm, abstraction and Chinese art theory, in fact his interest sits on the shoulders of the art historian Ernest Fenollosa, then Curator of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fenollosa is important in the emergence of art theory towards Orphic abstraction, not least because of his influence on another more practically orientated theorist than Wright, Arthur Wesley Dow, Professor of Fine Arts at Columbia University and teacher of Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber, among others. Dow is a key figure in preparing the ground for abstraction, releasing issues of design and form from mimetic concern, claiming that ‘seeing visual relations was like hearing music’.170 This was principally disseminated through his most important work, Composition: A series of exercises in art structures for the use of students and teachers (1899): While pursuing an investigation of Oriental painting and design at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts I met the late Professor Ernest F. Fenollosa. He was then in charge of the Japanese collections, a considerable portion of which had been gathered by him in Japan. He was a philosopher and logician gifted with a brilliant mind of great analytical power. This, with rare appreciation, gave him an insight into the nature of fine art such as few ever attain. As imperial art commissioner for the Japanese government he had exceptional opportunities for a critical knowledge of both Eastern and Western art. He at once gave me his cordial support in my quest, for he also felt the inadequacy of modern art teaching. He vigorously advocated a radically different idea, based as in music, upon synthetic principles. He believed music to be, in a sense, the key to the other fine arts, since its essence is pure beauty; that space art may be called “visual music” and may be studied and criticised from this point of view. Convinced that this new conception was a more reasonable approach to art, I gave much time to preparing with Professor Fenollosa a progressive series of synthetic exercises. My first

Orphism in America

191

experiment in applying these in teaching was made in 1889 in my Boston classes, with Professor Fenollosa as lecturer on the philosophy and history of art.171

Key to this for Dow was the concept of ‘synethesis’. In fact, the title page of Composition has a logotypic vignette decoration of a light and dark landscape framed under the Greek ΣΥΝΘΕΣΙΣ [synthesis] (Figure 4.15). For him this synthesis is the ‘perfect marriage on equal terms between the beauty in the subject and the beauty in the pictorial form’. This formulation perfectly matches, and indeed defines, Pater’s ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, and derives from Dow’s concern to find ‘a better method of teaching than the prevailing nature-copying’. It was Fenollosa’s emphasis on ‘visual music’, which emphasizes beauty of expression (or expression itself) over representation: ‘It is the ‘visual music’ that the Japanese so love in the rough ink paintings of their masters, where there is but a hint of facts.’172 As Dow explains: The Japanese knew no division into Representative and Decorative; they thought of painting as the art of two dimensions, the art of rhythm and harmony, in which modelling and nature-imitation are subordinate. As in pre-Renaissance times in Europe, the education of the Japanese artist was founded upon composition. Thorough grounding in fundamental principles of spacing, rhythm and notan,173 gave him the utmost freedom in design. He loved nature and went to her for his subjects, not to imitate.174

Figure 4.15 Frontispiece, A. W. Dow, Composition: A series of exercises in art structures for the use of students and teachers, 1st pub. 1899, reprinted 13th edition with introduction by J. Masheck, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

192

Improvision

These principles are represented very early in oriental art theory. Xie He wrote one of the most influential art texts, the ‘six principles of Chinese painting’, composed in the sixth century, which takes the form of the preface to his Record of the Classification of Old Painters (c. 550). This brief preparatory paragraph serves as an introductory note to a list of twenty-seven artists divided into six categories with brief comments by the author. The preface describes six points or techniques to consider when judging a painting. It is the first, the most important and fundamental of these, that directly involves the concept of rhythm. As the meaning of Xie He’s statement depends on a subtle understanding of sixth-century Chinese, I am dependent here on the help of a colleague, while taking responsibility for any errors in interpretation.175 The first of Xie He’s six principles, consisting of four characters (Ch’i-yun Shegtung), has been translated in a number of different ways, as can be seen in this short list by some of the most distinguished scholars:176 ● ● ● ●

●

Spiritual rhythm; movement of life (Osvald Sirén) A vital tone and atmosphere (Lin Yutang) Rhythmic vitality (Herbert A. Giles) Rhythmic vitality or spiritual rhythm expressed in the movement of life (Laurence Binyon) Engender a sense of movement through spirit consonance (James Cahill)

While we can suppose that what is being reached for in these translations is not simple verisimilitude, what is most intriguing is the regular evocation of rhythm as cognate. The problems of translation spring mainly from the fact that there is no traditional word in China that exactly equates to our use of rhythm. In musical contexts the more common term is closer to ‘measure’: the key character referred originally to the regularly, but not identically, spaced segments of a bamboo stem. In poetic contexts the modern term for rhythm draws on another character, yun (严), that actually signifies ‘rhyme’. This is what Xie He uses, saying ‘qiyun produces [a sense of] movement’. Here qi considered as an equivalent to ‘spirit’ is misleading, though many translations use it as the closest equivalent. Etymologically the word refers to ‘vapor’ or ‘steam’, and so it is not ‘spirit’ in the sense of being opposed to matter. This aqueous reference does allow us its extended use as meaning something that can flow, even if that something is as abstract as energy – a conception close to ancient Greek use as we shall see. The character yun appears to derive etymologically from another word meaning ‘equality’, which produces therefore ‘consonance’, in Cahill’s translation, among others. It was not used in ancient China, apparently, but seems to date from a time when contact with Indian languages through Buddhism had raised awareness of the phonological structure of Chinese, in which syllables consist of an ‘initial’ that is usually a consonant, and a ‘final’ that is usually a vowel, sometimes with a nasal or other vestigial consonant sound after the vowel. So, in translating ‘rhyme’ as ‘consonance’, Cahill is trying to bring out the etymology in a way that might suit an aesthetic vocabulary by softening the focus on rhyme. The character may have lost its specific association with rhyme over time – there are citations that point in this direction – but the sixth-century association seems to point strongly to the concept of rhythm, since it

Orphism in America

193

is used in contemporary contexts that talk of verbal rhythm. Yun is more closely associated with vocal articulation, but within the world of sound or image it always signifies something potentially rhythmic, and in combination with qi it would be accurate to talk of ‘pulses of energy’, even though ‘pulse’ in its literal, medical sense is expressed by another word. That word is employed in calligraphic theory in relation to xing, running script. In a Treatise on Calligraphy by Jiang Kuí (c. 1155–1221), running script is described in the following way: ‘What matters is that heavy and light strokes alternate, like the rhythm of blood flowing through the veins within a firm, strong structure of sinews and bones.’ Here the word underlying ‘rhythm’ is not that used by Xie, but the medical term for pulse. This emphasis on the brush stroke is very important. Indeed, Xie’s second principle of painting is concerned with the brush stroke, the ‘bone method’ (ku fa), the manner of using the brush. The importance of these two principles combined is that they point to an emphasis on process rather than on simple result: ‘the spirit lives in the point of the brush.’177 This is why painting and calligraphy are so intimately related, and it is why mark-making and rhythm become so integrated in early abstraction. They relate through processes of ‘emergence’, in ways explored by James Herbert in his recent book Brushstroke and Emergence.178 Using systems theory, Herbert shows that brushstrokes operate at one level of a complex process, that prompt somewhat unpredictable events at a higher level, producing phenomena that are not reduceable to each other. Simply put, it is this unpredictability that proves the material for a ‘dialogue’ between the artist and their work. The task facing the abstract artist was to develop a language of forms and gestures, as marks, that harnessed this dialogue, and an obvious analogue is the process of improvisation in jazz; consider Dove’s Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin. There is obviously a large variety of marks here, but there are also two categories that are particularly relevant. There are the arm marks, made with gesticulations of the hand, wrist or whole arm (such as most of the black marks). Then there are the colour-field marks, made to connect sections and fill in space, such as the blue, green and white passages. Here, gesture is absorbed in the drawing in of the paint to the support. The rhythmic gesture of bold, black marks in the centre of the composition is complemented by the tiny pulses of repeated units along the side and through the centre (thin, black, wavy lines). The painting, like the others in the series, is composed from layers of marks, with the cardboard support offering a warm brown-orange undertone on which to build the overall gold-hued tonality. Dove, like Kandinsky, as a pioneer in abstraction, could develop a language of marks, signs and gestures with relative freedom. The practice of painting to recorded music offered a form of syntax, providing Dove with an external rationale by which he could justify (if only to himself) the choice of this or that mark. What he thereafter produced was a record of the record, of an unfolding process arrested in a decision made in dialogue with sound and embodied marks. It forms an alternative form of notation, but not one that aimed at reproduction in the manner of conventional notation or in the nature of the record itself. It was not mimetic, rather it reproduced through analogical means rather than through symbols. What painting offered was an activity which, at the micro level, followed the subjective painterly reaction of listening to music on a phonograph, in a studio, possibly

194

Improvision

by himself, which accumulated marks into a macro image which did not describe the music per se, but rather the process at that particular time, in that particular place, through the ear to the hand and eye. Listening was, for Dove, a phenomenological activity, one which allowed the body to respond via paint to the sound, object and site. I quoted his recasting of Kandinsky’s earlier remark: ‘as the point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves it becomes a plane, as the plane moves it becomes a solid, as the solid moves it becomes life, and as life moves it becomes the present’. Records do this too. They move from the point of the needle to the line of the spiral groove, to the plane of the record surface (that needs turning), to the life of the music in the present sound; and it is only that present point which can be captured, which can only be painted through improvisation, in the here (hear) and now, the fleeting pursuit of the present. Mark-making and rhythm have a long history of dialogue. While The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians claims that, because the concept of rhythm is ‘hard to pin down . . . Etymology is thus of little assistance’, such a claim is only in part helpful. In fact, the history of the term is conceptually revealing. The English word ‘rhythm’ derives from the Latin rhythmus, ‘movement in time’, and more fundamentally the Greek rhythmos (ῥυθμός), often taken to derive from the root reo or rhein (as in the German river), ‘to flow’. Moreover, rhythm in Greek is a combination of motion and rest; seen, heard and felt as a line, flow or sequence. Pater recognized this in the Parthenon frieze when he wrote in a late, fragmentary essay that it is a ‘Frieze-like liturgic music, connection with breaks, pauses’, [the] ‘Procession. A cunning, skilful blending of rest and motion of life itself, that is to say elementary lines.’ Later he links rhythm and composition in the Parthenon horsemen and the singing boys and men in ‘Donatello’s Cantoria, the counterpart to della Robbia’s Cantoria for the Duomo in Florence’.179 A strong case has been made in more recent scholarship, since Eugen Petersen’s important essay of 1917,180 that the root of rhythmos derives from ern and is therefore related to the verb ‘draw’, rather than simply reo and ‘flow’. Further, Petersen argues that words with the suffix -thmos originally signified an active doing rather than a passive happening, which also suggests rhythmos was closer to ‘drawing’ than ‘flowing’. The Greek scholar Jerome Pollitt at Yale, in his study of the critical terminology of ancient Greek criticism The Ancient View of Greek Art, points out that there are close connections in many languages between ‘to draw’, meaning a physical action, and the word ‘drawing’ in a pictorial sense.181 Pollitt claims this understanding is key to a correct comprehension of ancient Greek usage of the concept. He writes in Art and Experience in Classical Greece, ‘the basic meaning of the word [rhythmos] was ‘shape’ or ‘pattern’. It seems to have become associated with music . . . because of its connection with dancing. A dancer, moving in time with music, performed specific ‘steps’ in time with the ‘beat’ . . . Between each step there were momentary ‘stops’ (called eremiai) in which the body was held for an instant in characteristic positions. These positions were rhythmoi, ‘patterns’ isolated within continual movement. A single well-chosen rhythmos could, in fact, convey the whole nature of movement.’182

Orphism in America

195

This makes rhythm intimate with and fundamental to the plastic arts. The philosopher Arthur Danto discusses drawing in ways we can see as consistent with this conception of rhythm as a ‘drawing’ and ‘attraction’, which he characterizes as ‘drawing power’. Drawing is related, he argues, to traction and ex-traction. He discusses the ideas of drawing and likeness, where drawing a portrait may be thought of as a process of drawing forth, rather like a poultice draws out an infection, an extraction of an essence. There is a flow, as the mark seems to have the power, as if ‘by magical transport, [to draw] the essence of an object, its formal reality, to materialize [it] on some alien surface.’183 This in turn might be related to Nietzsche’s conception of plastic power as he expressed it in The Birth of Tragedy (1872): ‘that continual urge and surge of a creative, form-giving, changeable force’, and, more fundamentally: ‘Man is a creature that fashions form and rhythm.’184 Forming and rhythm are intimately connected concepts. Indeed, as James Porter has so lucidly shown, Nietzsche’s investigations of Aristoxenian theory yielded interesting results. Aristoxenus of Tarentum is crucial for Nietzsche because he stands on the cusp between classical antiquity and post-classical modernity.185 Aristoxenus’ idea, expressed in Elements of Rhythm, is that rhythm is not identifiable with the materials it shapes. The word ‘shape’ is significant because ‘shape’ is the origin of the graphic sense of rhythmos, as Pollitt explained above. According to Aristoxenus, rhythm divides time and then arranges the division onto a shape: rhythm is the ‘form’, or at least an important constituent of it.186 Rhythm acts on two elements: a bodily medium (stone, paint, musical instruments, words, etc.) and time, but is also distinct from both of these things. This is because words may divide up into parts of words, but words do not divide into strict time lengths, even notes in music do not do this. They divide time, not the other way around. This idea, that time does not divide itself, shares characteristics with Bergson. Time should be divided through the agency of a material body, ‘The object made rhythmic must be capable of being divided into recognizable parts, by which it will divide time.’187 Porter puts these concerns succinctly: If rhythm isn’t identical with its objects or with their articulation (through movements of the hands, feet, or voice, thanks to which time is divided and rhythm is actuated), let alone with rhythmic composition, where does rhythm lie? Supervening on its objects as a division of time, rhythm is at once sensuous and abstract; it is ‘made perceptible to the senses,’ but it is less a sensation that the shape of one. What supervenes on objects made rhythmic is in fact a system of relations (ratios of time-length, or durations [chroni]), literally a structure of signs. Nietzsche’s reformulation of Aristoxenus brings out this perceptual tension that is basic to the phenomenon of rhythm: ‘Chroni are cuts in abstract time’ . . . Rhythm, incising itself into time, carves out chroni (durations) and Takttheile, the parts of measure (the formal divisions into thesis and arsis and their accompanying subdivisions) that can be recognized by the ear or eye only in their juxtaposition and in their proportional differences, but not heard or seen as such, while rhythm itself is the structural identity of this perception.188

This is why the formalist analysis of groove so often fails, because its character is found in the process of perception, not in the object of perception. This process of speculation

196

Improvision

about the fundamental nature of rhythm and its relationship to time could be seen to culminate in Nietzsche’s formulation that ‘Rhythm [Takt] is to be understood as something utterly fundamental, i.e., as the most primary sensation of time, as the very form of time.’ His notebooks contain his ambition to propose a philosophy of rhythm, and one that has great resonance with his later philosophical speculations: ‘Rhythm is an attempt at individuation. For rhythm to exists, there must be multiplicity and becoming. Here, the rage for beauty shows itself to be a motive for individuation. Rhythm is the form of becoming, [and] generally the form of the world of appearances.’189 For Nietzsche the essential character of the Greek conception of rhythm is that it is irrational (which is to say it does not admit of exact equivalence of measures). Irrational rhythms are more felt than accurately captured by analysis and theory. He commends Aristoxenus for achieving so much, in fact Aristoxenus describes irrational rhythms as ‘intermediate between two ratios that the senses can recognize’. Thus, for Nietzsche, such rhythm is at the limits of sensation, which is why it can create an ‘ecstatic’ effect. This irrational quality is Dionysian, part of Dionysian disruption. He contrasts this with modern and mechanical rhythm, which he characterizes as a ‘frightful tick-tock’, a mechanical ‘drum-beat’. Such an idea neatly sums up the common misunderstanding of jazz as mechanical music, largely due to a shallow understanding of rhythm. As explained above, the swing or groove of jazz is much closer to Nietzsche’s reading of ancient Greek irrational rhythm than modern ‘equivalence of measures’.190 I do not suggest this line of argument was necessarily taken up directly by early abstract painters, but its relevance is obvious. It is also clear why rhythm and improvisation present themselves as appropriate mechanisms in the construction of gestural abstraction; rhythm is intimate with the line of gesture. Pollitt’s earlier discussion of ‘rests’ or ‘stops’ developed out of Aristoxenus, who describes such gaps as present in all movement and sound, but particularly in dancing and music. These ‘rests’, it will be recalled, are points where motion came to a pause, enabling the viewer to ‘fasten his vision on a particular position that characterized the movement as a whole’.191 In other words, these rests allow comprehension of movement’s phrases. This, in turn, is not unrelated to Riegl’s perception that ‘gaps’, in material surfaces, provide a rhythmic patterning of space (and surface), ‘the emancipation of the interval, ground and space’.192 Stops or negative spaces (silences) produce patterns which produce rhythms: rests are necessary to comprehend rhythm, to feel a beat and pulse. In this regard it is interesting to consider Adorno again. He writes in chapter one of Aesthetic Theory: ‘Every artwork is an instant [Augenblick]; every successful work is a cessation [pause], a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye.’193In addition, as Berthold Hoeckner has shown, Adorno’s point is part of a longer aesthetic ideology. ‘Moment, in German means both instant (Augenblick) and part (Bestandteil). The former is a temporary category, the latter a material one. The former refers to a point in time, the latter to a particular detail.’194 He goes on ‘However short the instant, it may touch eternity; and however minute the detail, it may encompass all.’195 This in turn became an issue in music criticism, for understanding the relationship between part and whole, a measure of musical education and social status (Adorno’s ‘structural listener’, Jean Paul’s ‘good listener’). Part and whole enter a

Orphism in America

197

dialectical relationship, resulting in what Peter Szondi identifies as the ‘displacement of the hermeneutics of the individual passage’ with the idea of ‘spiritual understanding’.196 In this process, for Adorno, music becomes the prime art form in its grasp of the absolute. This triumph over linguistic meaning is celebrated by Dove in building from ‘parts’ to a whole via the example of music. However, with jazz as a model, questions of social status would weigh differently with Adorno. For him it is through harmony that modernism’s formal dialectic is conducted. If we chase the idea of the ‘moment’ back beyond Adorno, we also find it in Lessing and the concept of the ‘single moment’: ‘If the artist can never make use of more than a single moment in ever-changing nature . . . then it is evident that this single moment and the point from which it is to be viewed cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which gives free rein to the imagination is effective.’197 Yet for Adorno the impermanence of art is also a critique of capitalism: ‘Artworks, mortal human objects, pass away all the more rapidly the more doggedly they stave it off.’ He goes on: Although permanence cannot be excluded from the concept of their form, it is not their essence . . . Today it is conceivable and perhaps requisite that artworks immolate themselves through their temporal nucleus, devote their own life to the instant of the appearance of truth, and tracelessly vanish without diminishing themselves in the slightest . . . The idea of the permeance of works is modelled on the category of property and is thus ephemeral in the bourgeois sense: it was alien to many periods and important productions . . . Stockhausen’s concept of electronic works – which, since they are not notated in the traditional sense but immediately “realized” in their material, could be extinguished along with this material – is a splendid one of an art that makes emphatic claim yet is prepared to throw itself away.198

Of course, recordings give a semblance of permanence, but they can also be considered ‘aporia’ (‘the paradoxical unity of the vanishing and the preserved’, as Adorno put it) and therefore act as no more than the indication of a moment in the flow of improvisation. It was this aporia that Dove sought to express or recapture in the transcription of paint. We must briefly return to Pater, whose ‘condition of music’ was uttered at the time of the birth of the recording, for he too was a very active participant in the discussion of the ‘eternal moment’, bringing it into direct contact with the concept of rhythm. Pater’s main classical guide was Johannes Overbeck, but in his investigation he, as Whitney Davis has argued, had an ‘intuition similar to Petersen’ (discussed above).199 Pater related rhythmos to dance (as does Petersen and later Pollitt) as a physical expression of rhythmic flow and motion, and this rhythmos is also found in the dance of the athlete. In his discussion of Myron, the Discobolus (with a nod to cricket) he writes: Was it a portrait? That one can so much as ask the question is a proof how far the master, in spite of his lingering archaism, is come already from the antique marbles of AEgina. Was it the portrait of one much-admired youth, or rather the type, the

198

Improvision

rectified essence, of many such, at the most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the exercise of their natural powers, of what they really were? Have we here, in short, the sculptor Myron’s reasoned memory of many a quoit-player, of a long flight of quoit-players; as, were he here, he might have given us the cricketer, the passing generation of cricketers, sub specie eternitatis, under the eternal form of art?200

There is rhythm in the action and the compression of time: ‘Of the gradual development of such mastery of natural detail, a veritable counterfeit of nature, the veritable rhythmus of the runner, for example – twinkling heel and ivory shoulder – we have hints and traces in the historians of art.’201 The role of art for Pater, in its ‘condition of music’ is to capture this eternal moment, to bring it to ‘rests’ (hremiai) as Pollitt discusses. In his discussion of Myron, Pater explains that the Discobolus shows a ‘moment of rest . . . between two opposed motions’.202 It is a point drawn out of Pliny’s description of Myron as ‘more rhythmic in his art’ and Pollitt makes this point explicit; that the figure ‘above all illustrates rhythmos as it was produced in a rest. The figure is represented at the farthermost point in his backswing, thus, like the pendulum of a clock, suggesting to the viewer both the fact of the backswing and the potentiality of the forward swing.’203 However, I would want to resist the temptation to think of rhythm here as simply or reductively visual, any more than its conception is reductively sonic, for in its visuality (and its sonority) it is also tactile. As the Discobolus shows, it is felt, and in turn it becomes sound, song and sights. James Porter makes the point well in his discussion of ‘frozen music’, where he quotes Pindars’ fragmentary eighth Paean: Charmers temple The One a furious wind brought to Hyperboreans . . . O Muses. But of the other, what rhuthmos (ῥυθμός) was shown by the all-fashioning skills of Hephaistos and Athena? The walls were bronze and bronze columns stood in support and above the pediment sang six golden Charmers But the children of Kronos split open the earth with a thunderbolt and hid that most holy of works, in astonishment at the sweet voice because strangers were perishing away from their children and wives as they suspended their hearts on the honey-minded song . . . the man-releasing contrivance (?)

Orphism in America

199

of undamaged . . . to the virgin . . . and Pallas put (enchantment?) into their voice Mnemosyne declared to them all the things that are and happened before . . . . . . deception.

Porter points out, ‘The verses present a (literally) charming set of myths about the arts of building and music-making, strangely intersecting in a poem that is itself sung, in all likelihood carefully architectonic.’204 He goes on, in relation to Pindar’s rhuthmos (to use his spelling), invoking the concept of rhythm in movement with a phenomenality through ‘gravity, stress, thrust’. The experience of tactility is co-involved, along with the visual, as it takes on Daedalic rhythms that themselves come from the rhythm of building proportions, and as in poetry (as dactyl) combine into ‘feet’, bringing rhythm back into the body.205 ‘These rhythms turn imperceptibly into music, the song of the six golden Charmers’206 which is all resolved in the ekphrasis of Pindar’s own song. So, rhythm is to be ‘seen’ as phenomenological, even in its visuality (as Dove knew and as jazz shows so paradigmatically). Artistry here lies, as Pater recognized in his discussion of Polykleitos, in a ‘voluntary restraint in the exercise of such technical mastery’, a pull against ‘academic’ practice (Polykleitos’s Canon),207 a phenomenological feel for the beat and ‘rests’ (eremiai or hremiai), whether in architecture, poetry or sculpture. Despite this, Pater’s interest in an emergent modern subjectivity, as Alex Potts shows, is in tension with sculpture’s ‘denial of the living signs of selfhood’, a selfhood more readily evident in the abstract world of painting, poetry and above all music. ‘Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilation of light in the eye – music, by its subtle range of tones – can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its subtlest threads.’208 The Discobolus again: Of voluntary animal motion the very soul is undoubtedly there. We have but translations into marble of the original in bronze. In that, it was as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the metal, or the living youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest which lies between two opposed motions, the backward swing of the right arm, the movement forwards on which the left foot is in the very act of starting. The matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble, thus rests indeed; but the artistic form of it, in truth, scarcely more, even to the eye, than the rolling ball or disk, may be said to rest, at every moment of its course – just metaphysically, you know.209

The philosopher Suzanne Langer picks up this notion of ‘pregnant rests’, in Problems of Art (1957). She argues that a rhythmic pattern arises whenever the completion of one distinct event appears as the beginning of another. In relation to the subject of the Discobolus, she gives the example of a pendulum, where rhythm is created as a ‘functional involvement of successive events’. The key moment is in the exchange of

200

Improvision

one direction for the other. As we saw, Pollitt evokes the same example: ‘When a pendulum is depicted [in a painting, for example] in a completely vertical position, we do not ascribe movement to it in our minds, but when it is depicted at the far left or far right point of the swing, at the point where it momentarily stops before changing direction [the “rest”], we naturally think of it being in motion.’210 Thus the ‘rest’ is necessary to produce an ‘event’ which is then in relation to another and therefore potentially rhythmic. But the relation between them does not have to be symmetrical or clock based. Indeed, that would be to create ‘pulse’ or a ‘beat’ rather than rhythm. The interaction is felt, it is phenomenologically judged, lived. Langer shares Bergson’s view that music reflects time-as-becoming, as opposed to being-in-time. She places emphasis on dynamic form: ‘the reason why so complex a network of events as the life of an individual can possibly go on and in a continuous dynamic pattern is, that this pattern of events is rhythmic’.211 This is clear in the concept of ‘duration’, where time and change is not ordered by a set of successive events, by separate experiences (or images) like in a filmstrip, but an intuitive experience of living in time without differentiation from moment to moment (recall the earlier discussion of groove). Bergson wrote of past and present in Time and Free Will: both form ‘an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another’.212 Simultaneously in Bergson and in the practice of jazz, new relationships in rhythm were proposed, and the recognition that rhythm lies not in ‘clock’ time but is a more intuitive, felt, embodied expression is evident in the dialectical tension in paintings like Dove’s Rhapsody in Blue, Part I.213 This is formally represented in the framing gestures and, more literally, in the unwound clock-spring in the centre of the work. As Bergson put it, ‘There is simply the continuous melody of our inner life – a melody which is going on and will go on, indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence.’214 Dove literally undoes clock-time, turning it into a kinetic ambient sculptural presence. Regular time is replaced by gestures of wandering lines and patches and blotches of colour. In his book Music as Heard, Thomas Clifton developed an applied phenomenology of music which might prove helpful in consolidating some of these issues. Clifton argues, utilizing Husserl’s concepts of events as ‘protentions’ and ‘retentions’ (those yet to come and those that have occurred), that our perception of rhythm as flow (and duration) is to be understood through a nested sense of temporal contexts, where a ‘horizon’ of experience includes expectations out of which we structure our perceptions of relationships and experience music and temporality.215 Dove’s paintings situate themselves on this event horizon. Dove’s works are then records of records, and memories of concerts, they are a notation for captured or arrested moments of listening; they are ‘rests’, and have ‘rests’ within them. As Clifton (and Benson) stress, listener’s constitute music, they bring it into being ‘decided by human acts’, there being ‘no empirical difference between sound and music’.216 Dove’s paintings are ‘retentions’ of Whiteman’s recordings. A record of his different listenings, his changing understanding and experience of the music and mark-making across time, are all reconciled into a painterly present that holds and synthesizes them into a new visual record. To understand music in this sense, Clifton argues, is not to separate

Orphism in America

201

it from ‘performing [using] it’. Clifton employs Heidegger’s concepts of ‘presence-athand’ and ‘readiness-at-hand’ to explain this: the former might be used to describe the qualities of a paint brush, for example, made of wood or perhaps plastic; a metal ferrule that retains the bristles which are sometimes of sable or nylon, and range in size from 20/0 to 30, etc. This is its ‘way of being’, which might be thought of in Heidgegger’s terms as the bare facts of the thing. More often, however, we engage the world through readiness-at-hand, that is the ‘way of being’ for equipment (musical instruments, paint brushes, pens and tools would be examples) is only to be understood holistically, in terms of their use and function, through tacit knowledge. Thus, a brush is used to apply paint to a canvas or wall by an artist or decorator, it is associated with art and design. Such equipment is best understood by using it. It is a distinction between a detached, present-at-hand perspective and an engaged, ready-to-hand perspective. Music, Clifton argues, is only understood through ‘possession’. In fact, sound is only made music through possession, we use sound musically. As he puts it: In other words, prior to the music’s being ready-to-hand, its sounds already occupy a definite position in objective space-time. They lie there, up there on the stage, or coming out of a speaker. With the possessive act, this relation is changed . . . the sounds ofmusic comprise the equipment which we use to accomplish the task of discovering sense in the music.217

What Dove did in the record paintings was to regard music not merely as abstract, in the sense of disembodied sound, but as something to be engaged (played with), something that came into significance for him through the act of painting it. (This is not its only meaning, of course).218 This might remind us of Nikolai Kulbin’s words in The Blaue Reiter Almanac when he writes, regarding ‘free music’, although his words apply as well to jazz: ‘The improvisation of free tones may for the time being be taken down on Gramophone records. They may also be depicted in the form of drawing with rising and falling lines.’219 The Dove scholar Rachael DeLue rightly regards Dove’s paintings as intertextually related: his paintings from records, his early music paintings, his paintings of weather and the shore all play and engage related themes.220 Beyond his own oeuvre there are important relationships with his friend Stieglitz’s works, especially his photograph series Songs of the Sky (1922–1934), later called Equivalents and Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (1922). Dove greatly admired these photographs and finally purchased one in 1942. They are works which seek abstract, formal relations between music and the weather; temporal structures that are ‘paused/rested’ in visual imagery. The former series consists of over 200 photographs, in which Stieglitz images clouds (amorphous and constantly modulating forms – vital and dynamic forms, as Langer would describe them) abstracted by framing and cropping, to produce poetic images that show the ‘equivalence’ of natural forms with both the constant flux of modernity and the temporal dynamism and rhythm of music, not by resemblance but analogy. Like Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours (1912), Stieglitz uses amorphous forms as equivalent to music and abstraction. Such dynamic forms better serve the role of

202

Improvision

analogue as they represent becoming, or forming, rather than static, fixed forms. Another photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, would later describe the capture of the ‘decisive moment’ as ‘a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression’ by ‘instinctively fix[ing] a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless’.221 That the shutter should be controlled ‘instinctively’ relates it to the flow of a jazz improvisation, something decided in the moment of the movement.222 In abstract painting, this forming is most evident at the level of the brush stroke, the individual dynamic mark. As Richard Shiff has said of the roots of this ideology in nineteenth century painting, such art, ‘invested in touch as the immediate mark and the marking (or production) of authorial identity’.223 Marks come to signify the trace of the artist in the work, and their vital forming becomes visible. This should not be seen as a transparent activity, a straightforward immediacy, rather it is another convention.224 The desire here is not, however, for a reductive assumption of an immediacy between mark and intention, it is more that it is grounded in the expectation that marks signify beyond intent, because the moment is negotiated in improvisation, so meaning becomes emergent, it comes out of the play of mark-making, it is a consequence of the painting, not the painter. Earlier we discussed Kandinsky’s question, ‘What is to replace the missing object?’ In Dove the object is often not missing, but is physically incorporated, although this does not fix its meaning. It sits alongside the gestures of abstraction and holds no less a tension than that between the machine and abstraction in the work of Picabia. In the final chapter, the idea of the machine and musical abstraction is developed in relation to object and gesture, bringing these themes up to date.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

G. Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp’, trans. R. Manheim, ed. R. Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York, 1951), pp. 259–60. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 49. See for example, W. Trimpi, ‘The Meaning of Horace’s Ut Pictura Poesis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 36 (1973), pp. 1–34. https://doi. org/10.2307/751156. Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts, trans I. A. Richards (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 58. R. Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. W. A. Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 300. See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven: Yale, 2002), esp. ch. 1 ‘Ut pictura musica: interdisciplinarity, art, and music’. L. Viardot, ‘Ut picture musica’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (January 1859), pp. 19–29. Ibid. G. Buffet [Picabia], ‘Modern Art and the Public’, Camera Work, special issue (New York, June 1913), pp. 10–14, reprinted in M. Antliff and P. Leighten, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 557.

Orphism in America

203

10 See W. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton University Press, 1979). 11 Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, ‘The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’ (1910). In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (Yale, University Press, 2009), pp. 65–6. 12 R. Delaunay, published in Les Soirées de Paris (October 1913), p. 111. 13 W. I. Homer, ‘Picabia’s Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité and Her Friends’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 57, no. 1 (March 1975), pp. 110–15. 14 M. Komroff, in the New York Call, 1915, quoted after Marius de Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed. F. M. Naumann (London: MIT Press, 1996), p. 53. 15 The politics of American art at this time are complex, and while Stieglitz maintained a friendship with Picabia and Duchamp (and Dove) he had a very different conception of ‘American’ art. While they saw jazz, advertising, popular culture, commercialism etc. as iconic of the essence of America’s contribution to modernity, he maintained a more purist, organic, nature-inspired concept of American art. See W. M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Los Angeles, Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1999). 16 G. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (London: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 21–2. 17 There is some dispute over whether Ovid was in fact exiled, or whether it was fiction. See, for example, Jo-Marie Claassen, Ovid Revisited: The Poet in Exile (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 229. 18 For more on jazz and indexicality see I. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 19 The concept of metamorphosis in Picabia’s oeuvre is often noted and is key for understanding his polyphonic approach to both painting and poetry. Effectively he metamorphosed from Orpheus to Ovid. 20 1916, 50 × 65 cm, gouache and metallic paint on printed paper, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. 21 In the Musée d’Orsay (47 × 31 cm), first published in 291, no. 4, June 1915. 22 G. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 23. 23 Buffet quoted in Hugill, ‘The Origins of Electronic Music’ in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. N. Collins and J. d’Escriván (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 16. The original comes from a 1914 text ‘Musique d’aujourd’hui’ in Les soirées de Paris, vol. 2, Slatkine Reprints, p. 183. 24 There is a record of a workshop held in 1957 by Edgar Varèse, with some of that era’s most prominent jazz musicians: Art Farmer (trumpet), Hal McKusick (clarinet, alto sax), Teo Macero (tenor sax), Eddie Bert (trombone), Frank Rehak (trombone), Don Butterfield (tuba), Hall Overton (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), Ed Shaughnessy (drums), plus unidentified musicians on alto saxophone and the vibes. Extracts from these sessions were used by Varèse for his Poème électronique. Varèse also went to performances by John Coltraine in New York and Charlie Parker was interested in studying with Varèse in the autumn of 1954, but by the time Varèse returned from Europe in May 1955, Parker was dead. See: https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/06/ edgar-var%C3%A8se-and-the-jazzmen-mp3s.html . 25 L’artiste de la famille d’Abraham est l’ennemi de tout chiqué. Bien que préoccupé parfois de métaphysique, il n’affecte nullement des airs profonds. Il est volontiers boxeur et plutôt misogyne que tourneur en madrigaux. Il croit à l’indestructibilité de

204

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

Improvision la matière et à la perpétuité de l’esprit, qui en est comme le parfum. Le monde des idées et des formes lui apparaît comme un cosmos sympathique, tout en correspondances, rapports et ressemblances. Il aperçoit ce qu’il peut y avoir de communet déliant entre une fleur et un moteur à explosions, entre une ligne et une idée, une couleur et un souvenir, un amour et un phénomène chimique, un personnage biblique et une doctrine d’art, un piano et un peigne, la mer et un tramway. Ce qu’on peut prendre chez lui pour une affectation de comique, n’est que l’effet d’une ingénuité pure, d’un ferme et sincère désir d’exprimer tout l’humain par les moyens les plus directs. Il n’a pour objectif que de se confier, projeter dans la matière les réalités de son être intérieur. Et c’est ainsi que chaque œuvre d’art devient la représentation d’un monde particulier, recréé à l’image d’un homme. See https://nicholasacademy.com/scienceexperiment293combkazoo.html#. XLCkLetKjwc. See https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/performing-arts/musichistory/kazoos. See http://www.edenkazoo.com/index.php. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=hrt-5O1igE0. What sounds like a trombone solo at 2.00 is in fact a kazoo solo. Another early recording, by the Cannon’s Jug Stompers, ‘Jazz Gypsy Blues’ (1927) can be found at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=nIlztUGZMTs&feature=share. For more on the history of the kazoo see P. Jensen-Brown, ‘Bazoo, Kazoo, Bazooka – from Playful Instrument to Instrument of War (a History and Etymology of Kazoo and Bazooka)’ in Early Sports ’n Pop-Culture History Blog (accessed April, 2018). A trombone-like kazoo called the vocaphone occasionally featured in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. See also J. Harness, ‘Great Moments in Kazoo History’ at http://mentalfloss. com/article/29859/great-moments-kazoo-history. See http://www.steinwaybocaraton.com/knowledge-base/historical-prices-ofsteinway-pianos See D. W. Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, Continental Philosophical Review, April 2005, vol. 38, issue 1–2, pp. 88–123. This is also the only readymade for which Duchamp obeyed his own rules as laid out in the Green Box a few months before: ‘for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute), to ‘inscribe a readymade’, naturally inscribe that date, hour, minute, on the readymade, as information’. T. de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (London: MIT Press, 1998), p. 168. T. de Duve, ‘The Readymade and the Tube of Paint’, Artforum vol. 24, no. 6 (1986), pp. 110–21, quotation p. 115. De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 171. Ibid, p. 172. Picabia, in ‘Ne riez pas, c’est de la peinture et ça représente une jeune américaine’, Le Matin (1 December 1913), p. 1; reprinted in Picabia, Écrits I, p. 26. (My emphasis.) See J. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism (Yale University Press, 1994), p. 87. For more on this manifesto see Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, pp. 85–9. Weiss also discusses the repudiation of painting more generally, see p. 117 for another blank canvas. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907) reprinted in Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music (New York: Dover), pp. 84–5. Ibid, p. 76.

Orphism in America 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

49

50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

205

Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 84. Ibid, p. 86. As H. Martin puts it, ‘Difficult as it may be for the knowledgeable to accept, jazz improvisation has always been popularly associated with formlessness, a devil-maycare approach to music bordering on random, almost childlike spontaneity.’ Review of T. Owens, Bebop: The Music and Its Players, Annual Review of Jazz Studies, vol 7 (1994–5), ed. E. Berger, D. Cayer, H. Martin and D. Morgenstern (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), p. 263. For more on this see David Ake, Jazz Cultures (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 24–37. It is most commonly identified as a dog comb, although Varnedoe identifies it as more likely to be a disassembled cattle comb. Either way, its animalistic associations are often read as having sexual connotations. A modern example would be its use by Pharoah Sanders on his track ‘Hum-AllahHum-Allah-Hum-Allah’ from the album Jewels of Thought, recorded in 1969 (Impulse AS-9190). The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), p. 32. The readymade already made, although it was not at this point, was A bruit secret (With Hidden Noise) of 1916. In the Green Box he starts by writing that the concept of ‘delay’ should be used in preference to that of a painting or picture. See The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 26. Ibid, p. 31. S. Bloch, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box Art Journal, vol. 34, no. 1 (Autumn 1974), pp. 25–9 (quotation p. 25). L. Goehr, ‘Being True to the Work’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 55–67 at p. 55. He said of this approach, in relation to the first time he was invited to perform with fellow Norwegian jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft: ‘I had the idea of using musicians as “input” to my sampler instead of vinyl. We called it ‘live sampling.’ I found it appealing to work in a live situation with improvised music where things change at the blink of an eye. . . . I was able to work in past, present and future, according to what the other musicians were doing and how they reacted to what I was throwing back into the mix.’ See http://www.kalleklev.no/artists/1-artists/1430-jan-bang.html See also (although with poor sound and visuals) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wn2Jqi2ikRA . Published periodically by Phyllis Johnson 1965–71. See http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/index.html. Dickens, Hard Times (1854, various editions), see for example, Hard Times, 1945 (London: Collins, pp. 16–18, Book the First, ‘Sowing’ to ‘Murdering the Innocents’). De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 151. B. E. Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. x–xi. Quoted after S. Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation: The Law of the Extempore (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 75. J. Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 1. See J. Derrida, ‘Psyche. Inventions of the Other’ in Reading de Man Reading, ed. L. Waters and W. Godzich (University Press Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25–65.

206

Improvision

63 J. D. Smith, ‘Diva Dogs: Sounding Women Improvising’, PhD diss., University of British Columbia (2008), p. 32. 64 M. Gratier, ‘Grounding in musical interaction: Evidence from jazz performances’, Musicae Scientiae (special issue, ESCOM European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 2008, pp. 71–110) at pp. 77–78. 65 Ibid, p. 91. 66 See V. Iyer, ‘Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1998; V. Iyer, ‘Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in AfricanAmerican Music’, Music Perception, vol. 19, no. 3 (2002), pp. 387–414; V. Iyer, ‘Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation’, in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. R. O’Meally, B. Edwards and F. Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 393–403; V. Iyer, ‘Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 11, nos. 3–4 (2004), pp. 159–73; V. Iyer, ‘Improvisation: Terms and Conditions’, in Arcana IV: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Hips Road/Tzadik, 2009), pp. 171–5. 67 De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 152. 68 Ibid, p. 153. 69 Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guérin (Boston, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1996), pp. 146–7. 70 W. Kandinsky (1982), Complete Writings on Art, ed. K. C Lindsay and P. Vergo (Boston, Mass.: Da Cupo Press, 1994), p. 154. 71 Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love II), 1912, oil on canvas, 47 3/8 × 55 1/4 in. (120.3 × 140.3 cm), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 72 A. J. Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1914). 73 R. Fry in The Nation (2 August 1913), Albert Hall exhibition of the Allied Artists. Quoted in Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, pp. 116–17. 74 Sadler’s introduction to The Art of Spiritual Harmony (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), p. xxi. See also The Little Review 1, Nov. 1914, p. 70. See also the version published by Tate Publishing as Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with two prose poems and 26 letters by Kandinsky (most to Sadler) with a new introduction by A. Glew (Tate, 2006), quote p. xxxix. 75 Ibid, pp. xxxix and xlii. 76 Harold Victor Bauer was born in England in 1873 and died in Miami in 1951. A violinist first and pianist later, who premièred Brahm’s first piano concerto in America, and who between 1915 and 1929 recorded over 100 works for the Duo-Art and Ampico reproducing pianos, He was one of the most prolific virtuoso pianists in this medium of his era. 77 See Herman Schuchert, ‘Harold Bauer in Chicago’, The Little Review, 1, Nov. 1914, p. 53. 78 Ibid (Tate, 2006), p. 34. 79 A. J. Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, p. 125–26. 80 Ibid, p. 84. 81 Ibid, p. 69. 82 Ibid, p. 85. 83 Ibid, p. 91. 84 During his career he painted a total of seventeen paintings related to music between 1913 and 1944. 85 Cooper even makes the mistake of referring to this painting by the title ‘Improvisation’. H. Cooper, ‘Arthur Dove Paints a Record’, Notes in the History of Art,

Orphism in America

207

vol. 24, no. 2, special issue: Problems in Connoisseurship (Winter 2005), pp. 70–77. See p. 71. 86 ‘George Gershwin–Rhapsody in Blue Part I’ and ‘Part II’; ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise – George Gershwin’ and ‘Orange Grove in California – Irving Berlin’, and the additional lost painting ‘Rhythm Rag’. 87 In Arthur Dove: Life and Works with a Catalogue Raisonné by Ann Lee Morgan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1984) ‘Improvision’ is called ‘Improvisation’. 88 The following discussion has been greatly helped by Rachel DeLue’s work on Dove. It was she who first focused on the detail of the process by which Dove undertook his record paintings. Her work has made Dove a more complex and complete artist. 89 The piano (a 6ʹ4ʺ Steinway Grand) has been restored by a team lead by Robert Grijalva at the University of Michigan’s School of Music. While it has a new keyboard and sound board, the indentation marks on the wood above the keyboard that were made by Gershwin’s pen or pencil as he worked on his musical scores are still clearly visible. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbaldoni/2015/01/07/what-georgegershwins-piano-teaches-us-about-technology/#6f1d96a8424f. 90 However, Whiteman also employed in his orchestra such outstanding musicians as Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden and Eddie Lang. As reported about the former by Gerald Gold in an article ‘Early Jazz Figures Toast Bix Beiderbecke’ in The New York Times in 1981, he quotes the arranger Bill Challis (who worked from Whiteman and Jean Goldkette), explaining: ‘In the film, “’Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet”, which comes from a remark by Louis Armstrong, Mr. Challis talks about how he would arrange numbers for the Whiteman orchestra, leaving 8- or 16-bar openings for Beiderbecke to improvise in, and noting that Bix never disappointed him in rising to the occasion. “He took a load off my mind”, Mr. Challis said’, p. 16. 91 D. Schiff, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 22. 92 G. Gershwin, ‘The Composer in the Machine Age’ in O. M. Sayler (ed.), Revolt in the Arts (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), p. 265. 93 Schiff, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue, p. 61. 94 E. Wood, George Gershwin: His Life and Music. (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1996), p. 85. 95 See also J-M. Chen, J. R. Smith and J. Wolfe, ‘How to play the first bar of Rhapsody in Blue’, in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, June 2008, 123(5), p. 3123. 96 Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), pp. 81–83. 97 Compare the 1924 (Victor 55225-A) and 1927 (Victor 35822-A) Whiteman recordings. 98 L. Bernstein, ‘A Gershwin Tune’, Atlantic Monthly (April 1955) n.p. See also, R. R. Banagale, ‘Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’: Bernstein’s Formative Relationship with Rhapsody in Blue’, in Journal of the Society for American Music, January 2009, pp. 47–66. 99 Schiff, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, p. 25. 100 See Banagale (2009). 101 The ‘acoustic era’ was between 1877 and 1925, when recording was achieved mechanically (without electricity). The advent of microphone use from 1925 ushered in the ‘electrical era’. The ‘digital era’ arrived in the 1970s. 102 See D. Ewen, A Journey to Greatness: the Life and Music of George Gershwin (New York: Holt, 1956) and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ Library of Congress, US (https://www.loc.

208

103

104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111

112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

Improvision gov/programs/static/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/ RhapsodyInBlue.pdf ), entry by J. Farrington. In this regard I recommend the Stefano Bollani, Riccardo Chailly recording on Decca (2010), which allows the jazz pianist Bollani modest space to improvise, in a way no concert pianist has so far tried. However, the fluid identity of the piece can be described as Schiff does in these terms: ‘In the original scoring the band is playing jazz while the piano introduces classical elements; in the symphonic version the orchestra seems to be the classical element while the soloist takes on the burden of sounding jazzy.’ Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 10. Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 190 Ibid, pp. 190–91. See ‘The Translators Task, Walter Benjamin’, trans. Steven Rendall, www.erudit.org. TTR Traduction, terminologie, rédaction, volume 10, no. 2, 2e semestre 1997, pp. 151–65. See C. McDonald, The Ear of the Other, trans P. Kamuf (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, reprinted 1992), p. 122. Texts and discussions with Jacques Derrida, English edition by C. McDonald as The Ear of the Other, p. 122. See P. Dayan, ‘The Force of Music in Derrida’s Writing’, ch. 4, pp. 45–58, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music (London: Legenda, 2006), quotation pp. 53–4. ‘Trace’ is a complex concept in deconstruction. As Spivak says in her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. xvii): ‘I stick to “trace” in my translation, because it “looks the same” as Derrida’s word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word.’ This is because meaning is generated out of the difference between signifiers, especial in relation to their binary pair (thus up/down, black/ white, normal/abnormal, etc.), the sign therefore contains a trace or scent of what it does not mean. As Arnold Bennet, for example, expressed it in his novel ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1905), music: ‘Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.’ See Dayan, ‘The Force of Music in Derrida’s Writing’, p. 49. R. Z. DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect (University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 158. V. Iyer, ‘Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies’, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (vol. 1, ed. G. E. Lewis and B. Piekut, Oxford Handbooks Online, June 2014), pp. 74–90, quoted at 74 and 75. See for example R. Greenberg, George Gershwin (London: Phaidon, 1998), p. 60. J. Rasula, ‘Jazz and American modernism’ in W. Kalaidjian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 163. Iyer, ‘Improvisation’, p. 20. The ‘Victrola’ was a fairly generic term (rather like hoover, or biro) which, while it refers to a specific manufacturer, was often used more loosely. See M. Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2010), especially chapter 3, ‘Capturing Jazz’, pp. 80–93. For an interesting critique of this see A. Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (University of California Press, 2010). DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 155. Ibid, p. 165. See D. Everitt, ‘The Spotlight Shifts to Helen Torr, And Her View of Nature’s Rhythm’ in The New York Times, 09.02.2003. See also Anne Cohen DePietro, Arthur Dove and

Orphism in America

124

125 126

127 128 129 130

131 132 133

134

135

136

137 138 139 140

209

Helen Torr: The Huntington Years (The Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York, 1989). This 1920s process was memorably summed up by Blues singer Eddie ‘Son’ House, who recalled the actions of playing a pre-LP phonograph, ‘gettin’up, settin’ it back, turnin’ it round, crankin’ the crank, primin’ it up, and lettin’ the horn down’, all to be repeated every 3 or 4 minutes. Quoted after J. T. Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 276. J. T. Titon, Early Downhome Blues (University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 276. From a conversation between Dove’s son, William, and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., in August 1982, as reported in Stebbins and Carol Troyen, The Lane Collection: Twentieth-Century Paintings in the American Tradition (exhibition cat., Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), p. 24. Arthur Dove, ‘An Idea’ (in exhibition brochure, New York, The Intimate Gallery, 1927) n.p. After ‘An Idea’ and essay published to accompany the 1927 exhibition of his work, after DeLue, Arthur Dove, p. 159. Quoted after H. Geldzahler, American Painting in the Twentieth Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965), p. 56. A painter whose American vision, while very different from Dove’s, was just as affected by the sonic and music. See Leo Mazow’s excellent Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Quoted in S. M. Kootz, Modern American Painters (Brewer & Warren inc, Norwood, Mass: Plimpton Press, 1930), p. 38. Op. cit. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, pp. 109–10. DeLue argues that in ‘1926 he reported that he had “become a trifle reconciled with my old work of illustrating” and believed that his “experiments at this modernistic painting of mine” had improved his skill as an illustrator’ (see above DeLue, Arthur Dove, p. 166). This ‘inner need’ is defined by Sadler in his translation as ‘inner Notendigkeit, which means primarily the impulse felt by the artist for spiritual expression. Kandinsky is apt, however, to use the phrase sometimes to mean not only the hunger for spiritual expression, but also the actual expression itself’. (See The Art of Spiritual Harmony, p. 52). Ingrid Monson, for example, discusses the emotional and interpersonal aspects of the way jazz musicians discuss and understand groove, specifically the idea that playing ‘in the groove’, which is defined commonly as almost like letting the music ‘play itself ’. See I. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. chapter 2, ‘Grooving and Feeling’, pp. 26–72. See for example M. Abel, Groove: an aesthetic of measured time (Leiden: Brill, 2014); T. C. Roholt, Groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); and M. J. Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). See: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/486011. Quoted after W. C. Agee, ‘New Directions: The Late Works, 1938–1946’ in Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (MIT Press, 1997), p. 144. See I. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 2009), esp. around p. 68. L. Kramer, Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History (University of California Press, 2002), p. 77.

210

Improvision

141 P. Elson, ‘Listening in the Gaze: The Body in Keith Jarrett’s Solo Piano Improvisations’, in Music and Gesture, ed. A. Gritten and E. King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 192–207, quotation p. 200. See also D. Ake, Jazz Cultures (University of California Press, 2002), esp. ch. 4, ‘Body and Soul’, pp. 83–111. 142 For more on the visual in music see my Eye hEar The Visual in Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 143 T. C. Roholt, Groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 136 144 Ibid, p. 137. 145 DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 161. 146 Incidentally, Armstrong became the first African-American to host a nationally sponsored radio show the year before (1937) when he took over Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Show for twelve weeks. 147 DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 194. 148 See DeLue’s discussion as above, pp. 195–234. 149 See Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ‘Reminiscences/Three Pictures’, p. 370. He writes: ‘It took very long before I arrived at the correct answer to the question “What is to replace the object?”. I sometimes look back at the past and despair at how long the solution took me. My only consolation is that I have never been able to persuade myself to use a form that arose by way of logic, rather than feeling. I could not devise such forms, and it disgusts me when I see them. Every form I ever used arrived “of their own accord,” presenting itself fully fledged before my eyes, so that I only had to copy it, or else constituting itself actually in the course of work, often to my own surprise. Over the years, I have now learnt to control this formative power to a certain extent. I have trained myself not simply to let myself go, but to bridle the force operating within me, to guide it.’ This explanation of the improvisatory process echoes both Michelangelo (see n. 151 below) and many jazz musicians. 150 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, p. 154. 151 A quotation commonly given of which it is hard to find the origin. Here quoted after J. Russon, ‘The Project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in A Companion to Hegel, ed. S. Houlgate and M. Baur (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 47. 152 See D. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1999), section 10, ‘On the mind’, pp. 82–91, quotation p. 82. 153 Katz, Capturing Sound, p. 20. 154 Nipper (1884–95) was born and lived most of his life just down the road from my university office in Bristol, at the other end of Woodland Road (a long time before I took up residence!). 155 See T. D. Taylor, M. Katz and T. Grajeda (eds), Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 44. 156 M. H. Schubert, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies (Philadelphia University Press, 1971), p. 150. 157 Quoted after Katz, Capturing Sound, p. 19. 158 See my Eye hEar The Visual in Music (Routledge, 2013). 159 See P. Partridge, ‘The Home Set to Music’, Sunset, November 1924, 68, pp. 75–6 (reprint in Taylor, Katz and Grajeda (eds), Music, Sound, and Technology in America, pp. 53–6, quotation pp. 53–4. 160 O. Williams, ‘Times and Seasons’, Gramophone, June 1923, pp. 38–9. Reprinted in Taylor, Katz and Grajeda (eds), Music, Sound, and Technology in America, pp. 45–7.

Orphism in America

211

161 W. H. Wright, Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (New York: John Lane Company, 1915), p. 301. 162 Willard Huntington Wright also published detective fiction under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine. 163 Wright, Modern Painting, see chapter XIII, ‘Synchronism’, pp. 277–304. 164 Ibid, pp. 290–91. 165 See DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 88. 166 Willard Huntington Wright, The Future of Painting (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Ltd, 1923), p. 29. 167 See A. W. Rimington, The Art of Mobile Colour (New York: Fredrick Stokes, 1911), p. 185. 168 Ibid, p. 52. 169 Ibid, p. 54. 170 See G. Levin, Syncromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925 (New York: George Braziller, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), p. 42. 171 A. W. Dow, Composition: A series of exercises in art structures for the use of students and teachers, first published 1899 (repr. 13th edn. with introduction by J. Masheck, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 64–5. 172 Ibid, p. 114. 173 ‘Notan’ is a Japanese word which Dow uses to keep away from the three-dimensional implication of chiaroscuro, as ‘The notan of a pattern or picture is the arrangement of the dark and light masses’, p. 113. 174 Ibid, p. 136. 175 My grateful thanks to Professor Tim Barrett, Research Professor of East Asian History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for discussions regarding the nuances of translation. 176 The other five principles or laws are: 2. ‘Bone Method’, or the way of using the brush. This refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting. 3. ‘Correspondence to the Object’, or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line. 4. ‘Suitability to Type’, or the application of colour, including layers, value and tone. 5. ‘Division and Planning’, or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space and depth. 6. ‘Transmission by Copying’, or the copying of models, not only from life but also the works of antiquity. See also Osvald Sirén, The Chinese on the Art of Painting (New York: Schocken Books, 1963); James Cahill, ‘The Six Laws and How to Read Them’, Ars Orientalis 4 (1961), 372–81; Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art: Translations from the Masters of Chinese Art (New York: Putnam Sons, 1967); Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon (London: J. Murray, 1911); Herbet Allen Giles, Introduction to History of Chinese Pictorial Art (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1905, repr. 1918). 177 Quoted after L. Binyon, ‘The Flight of the Dragon’. An essay on the theory and practice of art in China and Japan, based on original sources (London; John Murray, 1911), p. 61. 178 J. D. Herbert, Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

212

Improvision

179 Quoted after L. Ostermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 77. 180 Eugen Petersen, ‘Rhythmus’, Abhandlungen der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Klass nf 16, no. 5 (1917), pp. 1–104. 181 J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (Yale, 1974), p. 136. 182 J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge University Press, 1972 and reprints), pp. 56–7. 183 A. C. Danto, ‘Oskar Kokoschka’ in Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 64. 184 Quoted after J. I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 127. 185 See n. 184 above. It should also be noted that rhythm as used by the Greeks is a fragmented and partical body of information: ‘clouded to an unknown degree by what little survives of the ancient theories’, p. 130. 186 Form is also a notoriously difficult principle to point to. As Schapiro puts it, form is a ‘plural concept that comprise[s] many regions and many orders within the same work . . . In any work, form . . . cover[s] several layers and scales of structure, expression and representation.’ See ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’ (1966) in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artists, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp. 33–49. 187 Quoted after Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, p. 140. 188 Ibid, pp. 140–1. 189 Quoted after Porter, p. 143. 190 For Nietzsche’s position on this see Porter, esp. pp. 160–6. Quotation p. 165. 191 Petersen, ‘Rhythmus’, pp. 1–104. 192 Quoted after C. D. Blanton, ‘Abstract in Concrete’ in The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture, ed. M. D’Arcy and M. Nilges (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 26. 193 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, trans R. Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 6. 194 B. Hoecker, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton University Press and Oxford, 2002), p. 4. 195 Ibid. 196 P. Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, trans. M. Woodmansee (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 108. 197 G. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. A. McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, University Press, 1962, originally published 1766), p. 19. 198 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 177–8. 199 See W. Davis, ‘Eternal Moment Pater on the Temporality of the Classical Ideal in Art’ in Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism, ed. C. Martindale, S. Evangelista and E. Prettejohn (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 81–95. 200 W. Pater, ‘The age of athletic prizemen: a chapter in Greek art’ in TheWorks of Walter Pater (Cambridge Library Collection – Literary Studies, 2011. Cambridge University Press), pp. 269–99: doi:10.1017/CBO9781139062275.008. It should also be noted that the issue of life-likeness in Pater is to be seen in dialogue with his reading of Winckelmann and the classical ideal, especially as it manifests a dynamic between

Orphism in America

201 202 203 204 205 206 207

208

209 210 211 212

213

214

215

216 217 218

219 220 221

213

sensuous immediacy and suspension (rest). For more on this see A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale University Press, 1994), esp. the final section ‘Modernity and its Discontents’, pp. 238–53. Ibid, p. 282. Ibid, p. 287. J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, p. 227. J. I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 437–8 and for Pindar translation. Ibid pp. 440–44. Ibid, p. 440. In the Canon, Polykleitos uses mathematical rotations based on the distal phalange of the little finger to creat proportions and rhythms (see A. J. Lawson, ‘Pattern, Tradition and Innovation in Vernacular Architecture’, PAST Journal, vol. 36, 2013, esp. pp 4–6. (http://www.pioneeramerica.org/past2013/past2013artlawton.html). W. Pater, ‘Winckelmann’ in The Renaissance (Oxford University Press, reprinted 1986), p. 136. See also A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale University Press, 1994). W. Pater, ‘The age of athletic prizemen: a chapter in Greek art’ in The Works of Walter Pater (Cambridge Library Collection – Literary Studies, 2011, p. 287). S. Langer, Problems of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), see esp. chapter 4. Quotation p. 51. Ibid, p. 50. H. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’ in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946; Dover reprint 2007), p. 124. This complex interaction of rhythm is taken further in Deleuze’s concept of rhythm, in which he distances himself from Bergson by arguing that for Bergson durée is too singular and unified, for him ‘there is always extensity in our durée, and always durée in matter’. Lived time is rhythmical in a dialectical relationship with matter. See Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 87. See also M. Gallope, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago, 2017), esp. chapter 4. H. Bergson, ‘The Multiplicity of Conscious States: The Idea of Duration’, in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910), p. 100. T. Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983). See esp. chapter 4, ‘Time as Motion’. He also says of rhythm in counterpoint, it has ‘the important task of subduing metric accent (hence the affinity between Bach and jazz)’, p. 271. Ibid, p. 272. Ibid, p. 292. It should be noted that Clifton aims to separate what he sees as musical essences from contingent associations. My engagement with his ideas is simply to help illuminate Dove’s music painting. W. Kandinsky and F. Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. and trans. with intro. by K. Lankheit (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 146. See DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Decisive-Moment (originally published as Images a la Sauvette) (New York: Simon Schuster, 1952) pp. 14, 8.

214

Improvision

222 See ‘Forms’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn, vol. 1, ed. B. Kernfeld (Macmillan, 2001). 223 R. Shiff, ‘Constructing Physicality’, Art Journal 50, Spring 1991, p. 43. 224 For an ideological discussion of this see ‘The Expressive Fallacy’ in H. Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 59–78.

5

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond

Part 1: Gesture and Object In 1968 the jazz pianist Bill Evans defined jazz in the following simple terms: ‘Jazz is the process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time.’1 This is to emphasis the gesture, and Kandinsky’s handling of colour and line emancipated from conventional representation moves in the same direction. In June 1913, two years after elaborating his aesthetic ideas in theoretical form in On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote Reminiscences, his rather poetic and synaesthetic account of his formation as an artist, an essay composed in a quasi-rondo form, which alternates vertiginously between youthful and mature theory. Kandinsky stressed the subjective and individual aspects of his own passage towards abstraction. He recalls the impact of Wagner’s music on the synaesthetic development of his sense of colour, which allowed the perception of colour’s existence as independent quale, separate from objects, as musical tones might be identified separately from instrumentation (a conceit that presumes musical sounds can exist independently of their source in objects). He recalls a formative adolescent experience in the opening sentences: The first colours to make a powerful impression on me were light juicy green, white, carmine red, black and yellow ochre. These memories go back as far back as the age of three. I observed these colours on various objects that today appear less distinctly before my eyes than the colours themselves.2

In other words, as a mature artist, Kandinsky recollects and imagines colour divorced from objects, abstracted, and thus colour acquires an existence separate from any physical manifestation. It should be noted that even here, despite this radical abstraction, a synaesthetic language seeps through (‘juicy green’). As we saw in the last chapter, in posing the fundamental question to abstract painting: ‘What is to replace the missing object?’, the answer came to him in improvisation. If colour could exist in a pure form, then marks and forms had to be conjured without conscious control. ‘Every form I ever used arrived of its own accord . . . in the course of work.’3 Form and colour both exist in themselves, surprising the painter in the process of construction. There is thus a 215

216

Improvision

creative (if often unconscious) tension between the idea of form (abstracted from nature) and the spontaneity of real time (abstract) composition. Intuition was undoubtedly in the air at the time Kandinsky was writing, as witnessed by Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, published in 1908, and Bergson’s Creative Evolution, published two years before in 1906. We have engaged Bergson’s ideas at various points, but one outcome of Worringer’s thesis is worth mentioning in relation to the relativity of artistic responses to nature (and hence to the object). Worringer argues that, while representation is perfectly legitimate as an aesthetic aim, so too is abstraction, and this latter is more common in non-classical art (by which he means for example the art of the Orient). For him the geometric is primary, however, for the ‘geometric style of art’ is art’s true foundation. He goes so far as to suggest that while prehistoric representational art is of cultural significance, it is not part of art’s true history.4 For him, art ‘does not begin with naturalistic constructs, but with ornamental-abstract ones’.5 Translated in Kandinsky, this urge to abstraction is located in klang, the sonority of imagination. It is achieved by the artist seeking to tune in to the resonance between the artist’s ‘soul’ and the world; an ‘atunement’. Hearing and listening are tropes for intuition. He looked for sonorous vibrations: All these forms, if truly artistic, fulfil their purpose and provide (even in the first instance) spiritual nourishment . . . Moreover, a sympathetic – or even an unsympathetic – vibration [chord] cannot remain merely empty or superficial; on the contrary, the ‘mood’ of the work can intensify – and transform – the mood of the spectator . . . They maintain it at a certain pitch, as do tuning-pegs the strings of instrument.6

In On the Spiritual in Art he refers frequently to the sound of colours: ‘our hearing of colors is so precise . . . the different tones of the colours, like those of music, are of a much subtler nature and awaken far subtler vibrations in the soul than can be described in words’. In fact, sound is the root of all art for Kandinksy. In his discussion of the difficulty of ‘translating between the arts’, he writes ‘the exact repetition of the same sound by different arts is not possible’.7 So while all is sound, all sound differently. The control of this sound is found in the materials of art, drawing and painting and the manipulation of the material surface, what he calls the linear extension of space; the exploitation of the canvas as a (fictive) three-dimensional space: the placement of forms (superimposition) and the effect of colour ‘which can recede or advance, strive forward or backward’.8 While Worringer had emphasized geometry as a root of abstraction, Kandinsky did not see this as fundamental; in fact, he refers to geometry as ‘the subjugation of composition’. For him, true artistic construction is ‘on a purely spiritual basis’, an intuitive basis, it begins ‘at random’.9 It creates form, and this is an issue with which Kupka also struggled. The idea that improvisation is ‘random’, however, should not be allowed to confuse it with ‘chaos’. What Kandinsky is pointing to here, I believe, is exactly the same concern as that addressed by improvising jazz musicians; playing by

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

217

ear and painting by eye are not so different. We should recall Rhames’ comment, and Kupka’s aim, to find a rapprochement between study and intuition. Kandinsky is aspiring to the same ambition. Rhames had explained that a jazz performer has a lifetime of preparation and knowledge behind every improvised idea. Rather like Whistler’s defence in his trial against Ruskin, the case is that each mark is the result of professional judgements built on cumulative experience. Further, Kandinsky hoped that this ‘cumulative experience’ would be cultural as well as individual. ‘Precisely because of the elementary state of our painting today, we are as yet scarcely able to derive inner experience from composition with wholly emancipated forms and colors.’10 This is a plea for a kind of ‘jazz tradition’; an evolving vocabulary of improvisatory forms that constantly play and develop in the act of forming. In his 1961 introduction to Kandinsky’s watercolours, Jean Cassou recalls an earlier anecdote by the Swiss artist Louis Moilliet, remembering that on a visit to the artist’s studio c. 1913 he found Kandinsky, ‘sitting in front of a canvas, his back turned . . . motionless, absorbed’, Kandinsky explained that he had been looking for a way of finishing the painting, and when ‘they rang the doorbell, he had his solution – with one sweep of the arm, the whiplash’ (the work may have been the watercolour ‘Red and Blue’ of 1913).11 Cassou concludes, this was ‘one of the artist’s most frequent gestures’. He goes on: ‘This lovely anecdote introduces us into those marvellous obscure zones where Kandinsky’s demonism acted in concert with chance incidents, forebodings, events.’12 The combination of a response to the pragmatic and mundane, together with the artistic imagination, produced the gestured, whiplash-painted stroke, and this combination of external and internal response exemplifies the aesthetics of improvisation, shared with the jazz musician, in the live response to aesthetic calculation and chance accident, producing live composition. This is not then calculation, but extemporization. In spite of the overtly purist, spiritualist rhetoric, this demonstrates the importance of the pragmatic act of painting for the artist. One of the key issues here is that in most of Kandinsky’s works in the first decades of the twentieth century, the ‘outcomes’ were rarely known in advance. Sketches and designs might often precede a final canvas, but the process of painting was always allowed to evolve in the process of final composition (performance), exactly as it does for many jazz musicians: ‘Improvisations draw, condense, confirm, cancel, and compensate for distinctions they themselves produce and reproduce, building complexity and relating structured and unstructured, prepared and unprepared, known and unknown elements to each other.’13 This was true of all his works at this time, not just the paintings he titled ‘Improvisations’. I stress this is not because improvisation is new, it is common to all art at all times, but because in this modernist context it takes on a particular creative significance. The added irony is that, in the pursuit of purism and the spiritual through artistic improvisation, a direction was often unwittingly, if perhaps unavoidably, sought through an intimate, sometimes sophisticated understanding of the opposite of the spiritual: the practical and material, the stuff of art. We discussed this ‘materiality’ in relation to Dove in the previous chapter, but in order to locate this capacity in the mature artist, Kandinsky sought it in his own first encounters with the material of art. He writes, in a remarkable passage in Reminiscences:

218

Improvision

As a 13- or 14-year old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paint box containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then . . . of paints emerging from the tube. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colours – exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release . . . living an independent life of their own, with all the necessary qualities for further, autonomous existence, prepared to make way readily, in an instant, for new combinations, to mingle with one another and create an infinite succession of new worlds.14

As Thierry de Duve has observed, this lyrical passage links the foundation of an abstract language of painting with a personal aesthetic experience that conjoins the naming of painting to that of colour. Colour is animate, but it is still, as De Duve has it, ‘virgin’, propelled by ‘inner necessity’ or the klang of art, until the moment it is mixed by the brush: ‘It sometimes seemed to me as if the brush, as it tore pieces with inexorable will from this living being that is color, conjured up in the process a musical sound. Sometimes I could hear the hiss of the colors as they mingled.’15 A little later Kandinsky furthers this violence of the brush: ‘And then comes the imperious brush . . . like a European colonist who with axe, spade, hammer, saw, penetrates the virgin jungle . . . bending it to conform to his will.’16 Kandinsky first sees the canvas as a ‘chaste maiden . . . this pure canvas that is as beautiful as a picture’ and the palette is likewise a ‘work’, ‘more beautiful indeed than many a work’. But both these ‘natural’ or pure elements, or ‘ready-made works’, need absorption into the artist’s psyche, and in so doing Kandinsky conjures a curious adolescent erotic saga of conquest, with phallic brush and virgin paint; a process that sounds as it colours. It is a passage that De Duve links analogically to Duchamp’s rites of passage in his painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912). Duchamp produced this painting, The Passage, in Munich, at the same time that Kandinsky was resident there. While it is unlikely that Duchamp actually met Kandinsky, it is very likely that he purchased the second edition of Concerning the Spiritual in Art (dated May 1912) while in Munich, into which he added annotations and translated significant passages. Duchamp’s work can be directly related to Kandinsky’s ideas, and to abstract art theory more generally (especially that of Delaunay and of Kupka). According to De Duve, it is positioned as a commentary on a more general move towards abstraction in painting. Duchamp’s work in this period needs to be seen in the context of debates around Apollinaire as well as those emanating from Kandinsky. What links them is the Orphic spirit.

Duchamp’s painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912),17 is almost contemporary with Kandinsky’s Reminiscences, and depicts a related theme: a female mechanomorphic form that reinvents the anatomy of the standard wooden artist’s model, transforming it into a merged series of planes, volumes and lines of intersection. It probably drew on his experience of seeing, in June 1912, the stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s novel

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

219

Impressions d’Afrique, a bizarre, funny, proto-surreal tale of shipwreck on the ‘African’ coast, developed through the use of puns and metagrams (as explored in Chapter 3), and involving a character called ‘Louise’. She becomes a kind of biological-mechanical hybrid, with pipes that replace one of her lungs, referred to as ‘sounding tubes’. She incorporates them into an officer’s uniform to make them aesthetically pleasing. She finds this effect ‘very becoming’, ‘and was able to admire [it] . . . allowing her splendid fair hair . . . to fall in natural curls below the small forage cap worn jauntily over one ear’. Although each night she closed the ‘aperture with a metal plug after having removed the apparatus, which lost its utility during the calm, regular breathing of sleep’.18 Its setting, in a radically fictional Africa, provokes similar colonial references to those raised in Kandinsky’s tale of his first discovery of oil paint tubes. Roussel’s Africa is a site for imaginative invention, for the performance of the aptly named ‘Incomparables Club’.19 A narrative of influence on Duchamp, Picabia and later Andre Breton, it nevertheless is pitched between elements of colonialism and a commentary on European attitudes to Africa. The idea, or site, of Africa as a complex and conflictual space for Western modernism to imagine itself through, was no less the case for jazz. But here it was not usually an attempt to access some essential African nature. This quest was often carried out by disenfranchised African-Americans, and what emerged from this musical dialogue was not an essential African identity but the evolution of a new identity: a modern sensibility emergent from a type of cultural hybridity. As I have argued, creative mixture is jazz’s natural condition and is central to its technique as a dialogue, both with other musics and in improvisation with other musicians. The implications for notions of meaning in art in relation to such a dialogue were discussed by the contemporary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and boundless future). Even past meanings, that is those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way, they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context).20

It was this that Kandinsky sought in an evolving vocabulary of improvisatory forms, interior to painting in the process of improvised execution, and exterior to individual works in an abstract gestural ‘tradition’. Jazz is dialogic, or heteroglossic, and it is this idea of mixture to which Duchamp was attracted in the Rousselian mythical Africa. For both Kandinsky and Duchamp, Africa signified a conception of origin, but its signifying status was not stable. While Africa was problematically sited as an Eden for some, a site of ‘primitive’ origin, for others it was both polyphonic and relative. In their interest in sites of ‘origin’ both Duchamp and Kandinsky link painting, or art making, to a visceral, sexual life force that finds its expression in abstraction. In Duchamp’s The

220

Improvision

Passage from Virgin to Bride he moves towards abstraction, creating ambiguous structures in which volume and void are deployed in an extreme cubist style. This complex rethinking of compositional space even extends beyond the confines of the frame, as the ‘figures’ depicted do not fit within the enclosure of the canvas. The title, like many of those of Picabia, was also incorporated in this space being written on the painting (bottom left) and signed (middle) so that there is a tension between word and image space within the extreme ambiguity of forms. The central figure, rather than the resolving to a form, fails to coalesce into virgin or bride and is instead trapped in the process of formation. This irresolution is significant, figuring the work as being as much about psychic process as temporal modulation. The image retains an essentially dialogic character. It is this dialogue that constitutes the subject of the painting, its ‘passage’ from one state to its opposite, le passage de la vierge à la mariée. The whole painting also has a passage, or a direction (from left to right), but no visually focused destination. Even if the title ‘resolves’ virgin into bride the image remains pending. In Arturo Schwarz’s reading of Duchamp’s painting, the alchemical resonances position the ‘bride’ (as part of the Chymical Wedding) as classically androgynous, and thus no less resolved dialogically.21 This lack of determination, as in all abstract art, produces an orientation ‘toward’ the viewer; provoking a stress on the beholders share. Bakhtin has explained this in relation to language: The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation with any living dialogue. The orientation towards an answer is open, blatant and concrete . . . Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social ‘languages’ come to interact with one another.22

This idea, of a viewer resolving the work, is taken up by Duchamp in his essay ‘The Creative Act’, discussed in Chapter four. But this orientation only became more pronounced in Duchamp’s own journey from painter to artist. Jazz, too, provoked an active audience–performer interaction in ways actively avoided in the classical tradition.23 This painting thus forms part of Duchamp’s passage from painter, or retinal artist, to Ready-made conceptualist, a journey that leads from The Bride to the Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), and beyond to Étant donnés (1946–66). By journey I do not mean to imply a straight line, as Duchamp’s production around 1913 is incredibly varied, but this passage from painting to readymade, recontextualized object, like and unlike Picabia, is marked by a turn to mechanical

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

221

drawing. The most familiar example is the painting of 1913, Chocolate Grinder no. 1. This is how Duchamp later characterized this change of style: From 1913 on, I concentrated all my activities on the planning of the Large Glass and made a study of every detail, like this oil painting which is called Chocolate Grinder (no.2) of 1914. It was actually suggested by a chocolate grinding machine I saw in the window of a confectionery shop in Rouen. Through the introduction of straight perspective and a very geometrical design of a definite grinding machine like this one, I felt definitely out of the Cubist straightjacket.24

Mechanical drawing techniques, Duchamp believed, lay outside artistic conventions and aesthetic consideration (the former may in part be true, the latter is not); they avoided, as far as he was concerned, operations of taste, they renounced expression and are thus en route towards the aesthetics of the readymade as he would formulate it. Duchamp was thus moving from ‘painting’ to ‘art’, or from an explicit concern with medium to a greater focus on the concept, as he later put it in 1961: The word ‘art’, etymologically speaking, means to make, simply to make. Now what is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting it on a palette . . . So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you can also use a Ready-made thing, made either mechanically or by hand of another man, even, if you want, and appropriate it, since it’s you who chose it. Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.25

Choice is also the main thing in improvisation, but as De Duve has suggested, here we can understand Duchamp to be claiming the concept of the readymade as a sort of abnormal painting more generally. In reply to Kandinsky’s claim that abstract ‘pure’ painting emerges straight from the virgin paint tube, Duchamp is claiming the paint tube itself as readymade. Duchamp is interested in paint as stuff, Kandinsky’s paint is a cypher for colour. Duchamp was always engaged by the form in which his ideas might manifest themselves; many of his works are as innovative in media as they are in ideas. He was no less aware of the tension between object and idea than Kandinsky, but for him this tension travelled in the opposite direction. Paint, or more specifically colour, was something Duchamp thought much about at this time, experimenting with diverse materials to create new hues and textures, finding, for example, that graphite and quick-drying linseed oil produced the colour of steel, and soapy water and strong tea offered a variety of hues from brown-yellow to green. He also considered the possibility of ‘breeding’ colours in a greenhouse by mixing coloured flowers that would also involve an olfactory combination, a synaesthetic blending. He went so far as to co-opt other ‘readymade’ art materials: toothpaste, brilliantine and cold cream, red and yellow shoe polish and, perhaps not surprisingly given the drawing in question, chocolate.26 Duchamp again, in 1962: Let’s say you use a tube of paint; you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it Ready-made. Even if you mix two vermilions together, it’s still a mixing of two

222

Improvision

Ready-mades. So man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from Ready-made things like even his own mother and father.27

Ultimately this leads to all painting becoming subsumed within the frame of the readymade: ‘Since tubes of paint used by artists are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all paintings in the world are “Ready-mades aided” and also works of assemblage.’ Painting and Ready-made thus become points on the same path. Before we go further down this particular track, let us step back to consider this switching point between the concepts of painting and the readymade as they would have presented themselves around 1913 in Duchamp’s work. As mentioned, Duchamp owned a copy of On the Spiritual in Art during his time in Munich. It is certainly the case that he would have been intimate with the discussions, theories and justifications offered for the transit of painting towards the condition of music, towards abstraction. In fact, Duchamp is reported to have been responsible for finding Kandinsky a studio in Neuilly.28 In addition, his brother’s studio, it will be recalled, was next door to František Kupka. This shared Orphic impulse manifests through the god not only in the abstract, emotionally moving impact of his music, but also through the power of his music to move ‘the rocks and woods and creatures of the wild’. Orpheus could move both animate and inanimate matter, pysches and bodies. In Les Peintres Cubistes, we recall that Apollinaire wrote of Duchamp: This art, which strives to aestheticize the musical perceptions of nature, does not allow itself caprice or the inexpressive arabesque of music. An art whose aim would be to extract from nature not intellectual generalizations but collective forms and colours, the perception of which has not yet become a notion, is quite conceivable, and it seems that a painter like Marcel Duchamp is in the process of bringing it into being.29

Apollinaire defined this ‘musical perception of nature’ as ‘Orphic Cubism’ (in contrast to ‘Physical Cubism’ and ‘Instinctive Cubism’). Apollinaire was more perceptive in this than is often acknowledged. He saw Orpheus as a governing paradigm for both Duchamp and Picabia. Both these artists had an interest in internal mental and psychological states which resonate with the Orphism impulse, as the subject of their paintings turned from external scenes to an address to inner states (if not ‘inner necessity’) and processes. In doing this, painting relinquishes its claim to picture or mirror the outside world and instead takes up the condition of music as an art of subjectivity, of the individual, of expression and the internal. For Duchamp, Orphism was an art of moving bodies filtered through the passages of the mind and memory, for which Bergson was a significant figure. We can see this if we turn to his most successful painting, the one that made his name in America, the Nude Descending a Staircase. According to Duchamp, the origins of this painting lie in his drawings inspired by Jules Laforgue’s Sanglot de la terre, specifically the poem ‘Encore à cet astre’. It is worth noting in passing that music forms a prominent theme in much of Laforgue’s writing. The first stanza:

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

223

Encore à cet astre Espèce de soleil ! tu songes : – Voyez-les, Ces pantins morphinés, buveurs de lait d’ânesse Et de café ; sans trêve, en vain, je leur caresse L’échine de mes feux, ils vont étiolés ! – ... What kind of sun is this! you wonder – Look at them, These drugged puppets, imbibers of asses’ milk And of coffee; ceaselessly, I caress their spines With my flames, but in vain; they grow pale.30

This is a poem of resignation to death, in which ‘puppets’, although caressed by the warmth of the sun, are as doomed as the sun is, ultimately, mocked by other ‘heartless stars’.31 Although not explicitly referencing music, the poem might be thought implicitly to address a detuning of the music of the spheres, a failure of a type of harmony to resolve and settle. Duchamp’s drawing (Figure 5.1) in response to this poem is of one figure seen in three parts, or possibly of three different figures; female nude, lower torso (left) a face (centre) and a more ambiguous figure walking up a staircase (right).32 The female nude may be descending a stair and the clothed (male?) figure on the right ascends, with a head suspended between them; it is a composition that has much in common with two other works of 1911, Yvonne et Magdeleine déchiquetées and Portrait de joueurs d’échecs.33 The staircase here is probably a symbol of the treadmill of life, of the mind and body disengaged (a Cartesian conundrum). Could this not also refer to the descent of Orpheus after his Eurydice, which shares with the poem a theme of retreat from sunlight into darkness and death? I explained earlier that the myth of Orpheus is a tale about the power of music to access the emotional over the rational, the physical over the mental, the body over the mind, but it is also a myth caught between sight and sound. That Orpheus cannot trust his ear to tell him Eurydice is still behind him is greatly significant: could he not hear her talking, keeping pace, in rhythm with his own steps? Why does he need to confirm her presence through sight, by turning his head and using his eyes as he gets to the light, rather than trusting his finely tuned ears in the dark? It confirms the way, as I have put it before, that music is shadowed by the visual. Vision acts to ‘earth’ music, to give it site and significance: sight is music’s twin, not its opposite.34 Apollinaire had described Duchamp’s art at this time as striving, like all Orphist art, towards the ‘aestheticization’ of ‘musical perceptions of nature’. It is this moving spirit of Orpheus that so aptly describes Duchamp’s early aesthetic. The painting that made Duchamp’s name in New York, the cause célèbre of the whole Armory Show, was his Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912). The origins of this painting are thus not distant from the myth of Orpheus. Music provided Orpheus with access to the underworld. It re-animated, even in the realm of death, moving bodies and minds, and accompanying his solo descent and dialogic ascent. The idea of music

224

Improvision

Figure 5.1 Marcel Duchamp, Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star), 1911, graphite on beige wove paper, 25.1 × 16.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-134-57. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.

provided Duchamp with an alternative to ‘retinal art’, a fact evident in the myth of Orpheus, who in the end resorts to sight, just as Duchamp was to do with Étant donnés. Duchamp’s approach to abstraction, and consequent change of direction, was emphatically connected to this ‘musical perception’ (to use Apollinaire’s phrase). His painting of the year before the Nude, Sonata of 1911, represents the artist’s mother with her three daughters:35 ‘The pale and tender tonalities of this picture, in which the angular contours are bathed in an evanescent atmosphere, make it a definitive turning point in my evolution’, as Duchamp wrote in 1964.36 His sister Suzanne sits in the

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

225

foreground, reading or looking (perhaps at music), while Yvonne is at the piano and Magdeleine is playing a violin.37 Madame Duchamp stands in the background looking out to the viewer and, we might think, listening to her daughters; an all-female, harmonious, but atomized depiction, which has each figure looking in a different direction, but all joined by hearing, supposedly. We know, from more than one source, that Mme Duchamp had become deaf by the time the picture was painted.38 Her principle access to music, like ours in this painting, is through sight and the recollection and synthesis of memory, although in practice she may well have had some degree of hearing. Music here is not just sound, or not even sound, but it is sight and community. The title Sonata has irony. Coming from the Latin sonare, ‘to sound’, sonata was always opposed to cantata from the Latin cantare, ‘to sing’. Here, sound is silenced for us in the painting, as it was for Duchamp’s mother, who stands at its centre as our mirror, and yet it is, nonetheless, a painting that shows instrumental music in four movements. Duchamp’s sisters were also, in large part, responsible for his first ‘sounded’ artwork. During a New Year’s visit to his parent’s home in Rouen in 1913, he composed a vocal piece with two of the three sisters he had depicted in Sonata, Yvonne and Magdeleine. To compose this work, they all randomly picked 25 notes from out of a hat, ranging from F below middle C to F two octaves above middle C. The notes were transcribed onto a music manuscript according to the sequence in which they were drawn, and the three parts were then marked ‘Yvonne’, ‘Magdeleine’ and ‘Marcel’. To finish the work, Duchamp added words from a dictionary definition of imprimer to the manuscript. ‘Imprimer’ means ‘to make an imprint’, ‘mark with lines’, ‘a figure on a surface’, or to ‘impress a seal in wax’. The addition of words potentially turned the piece into a song (from sonare to cantare). He also titled it, Erratum Musical, which can be translated as ‘musical misprint’, or, more specifically, the ‘erratum’ refers to a mistake in the writing down, in the transcription, in the space between the improvised conception and execution of the idea and the fixing with notation. The text therefore conjures a dialectical (Orphean) relationship between seeing and hearing, in a way related to Sonata. Writing music is like writing words and drawing, it is making visible, fixing sounds on paper, and it is in the making visible that mistakes (errata) happen. Further, this text is itself a form of readymade,39 in that it is a dictionary definition, which is then re-made through the addition of music.40 While Duchamp could not really be described as a jazz fan (he tended to keep a distance from many things), he was drawn to music more generally. In New York it would have been impossible to avoid jazz. Indeed, later in New York his closeness to the Stettheimer circle, and their vociferous discussion of each other’s art, would have brought him frequently into contact with jazz and jazz ideas. Florine Stettheimer’s aesthetic was itself described by her friend and member of the circle Carl Van Vechten, a patron of the Harlem Renaissance, in the following terms: ‘The lady has got into her painting a very modern quality, the quality that ambitious American musicians will have to get into their compositions before anyone will listen to them. At the risk of being misunderstood, I must call this quality jazz.’41 Duchamp was attracted to notions of chance and aleatoric approaches, and the challenge they pose to convention and theory, and in this he shared the general

226

Improvision

perception of jazz as a music that seemed to be beyond rules and that challenged established timbral and rhythmic expectations. Jazz’s central aesthetic characteristic, improvisation, while not the same as ‘chance’, is nevertheless open to it in its core creative principles. To understand the byways through which such aesthetic questions might become entwined, we can briefly return to Laforgue’s poem, ‘Encore à cet astre’, and one curious word in its second stanza, ‘kermesse’. This term refers to two unrelated activities, for as well as referring to a religious festival or fair, it may have had another resonance for Duchamp, which, while somewhat obscure, is not, I want to suggest, disconnected from music: ‘kermesse’ is also a term used to describe a variety of road cycle race.42

Bicycles In 1914 Duchamp produced The Box of 1914, the first in a line of facsimile publications of his notes and images in miniature.43 A very limited edition of five copies of The Box of 1914 assembled sixteen photographic facsimiles of manuscript notes and works, one photographic facsimile of the drawing Médiocrité, which was unmounted, and another single drawing mounted on board, all presented in a commercial box originally designed to hold photographic paper (see Figure 5.2). The one other drawing included in this work was intriguingly entitled Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil, which is usually translated as To Have the Apprentice in the Sun. It also puns, significantly, on the word apparenti linked to apparenté – meaning ‘cognate’, ‘related’ or ‘connected’, a pun on the idea of a pun.44 Thus Duchamp uses sound equivalence to bring together two different elements in ways that are cognate with the image and its title. Titles are important for Duchamp. He called them an invisible colour, and they are never simple adjuncts to his art, but integral parts providing a key element of the mise en scène of the whole work. This little drawing acts in significant ways, I want to suggest, as a meta-image: an image about what it means to make an image in the art world in 1914. It is a definition of drawing itself. Like Erratum Musical, which utilized the dictionary definition of imprimer, this drawing is a work about ‘a figure on a surface’, ‘a marking with lines’. It is a drawing of a cyclist riding up a slope, drawn on a sheet of hand-inscribed, blank music paper (Figure 5.3). Again, like Erratum, the title and image operate in the same pictorial space, dialogically, the text a kind of ground beneath the cyclist. The title deliberately sets up a pun that can be translated as: ‘given to sight; the imprint which is in the ground: avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil = à voir: l’empreinte qui dans le sol est. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines drawing as: ‘1) trace or produce (a line or mark) on a surface; 2) pull or move something in a specific direction’.45 We considered in the previous chapter Danto’s remarks on drawing and rhythm, relating to flow and extraction, where he explained: ‘by magical transport, [to draw] the essence of an object, its formal reality, to materialize [it] on some alien surface’.46 Here the marks pull a cyclist up a slope (a specific direction), or perhaps imprint a cyclist over an alien surface, the surface of another art form, a musical stave, but one that is also drawn. To imprint is, similarly, according to the OED, ‘to stamp or mark an outline on a surface’,

227

Figure 5.2 Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914, 1913–14, cardboard box with facsimiles, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp, 1991-133-1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.

228

Improvision

which is in turn a drawing, a marking with lines.47 Key here is the idea of ground; where it is and how marks signify it. The first marks Duchamp made were abstract lines, groups or sets of five, to define musical staves. Whether he used a noligraph (5-line staff pen) or ruler and pen is not clear, but in either case the lines form another version of ‘mechanical’ (uniform) drawing, but they are drawing, they are not separate from the other parts of the drawing even if they form a ground, they are part of the drawn mise en scène. Musical manuscript paper conventionally forms a ground, marked with groups of five lines, upon which musical time and space is then inscribed or imprinted. But in this work, musical space-time has been rendered by Duchamp as pictorial space-time, melos has been translated into opsis, through the addition of a (figurative) drawing, rather than the addition of (abstract) musical notation. The cyclist now ascends a musical incline or scale. This is an ascent from the ground to the sun, as the punning title has it – from ‘sol’ (‘ground’ or ‘soil’ in French) to soleil (sun). And sol is also, of course, the fifth degree of the Tonic sol-fa scale, a form of solfège, which is a system of attributing distinct syllables to each note of a musical scale, another form of translation back from melos to lexis. The cursive line which forms the incline is like an unfurled treble clef, but it also operates in fictive pictorial space, suggesting pictorial recession, and in this way creates an even more ambiguous ground-to-figure relationship. The space of music, whereby ascent = height = rise-in-pitch, is here conflated with an illusionistic rising up (and possibly out of) the page. This is a work in which music forms the pictorial ground from which an illusion emerges, struggling uphill, from the abstract ground of music to the illusion of a figure. Ironically, if we take the music stave to be in the treble, then the ‘ascent’ (from the point where the unfurling line starts to the point where it stops), despite the obvious effort, is only up a fifth from B to F sharp, to make a true 5th. If the stave is in the bass clef, from D to A. (In fixed do solfège, the sol would represent the key of G, so F would be sharp.) In other words, the cyclist is ‘pulled in a specific direction’ from tonic to sol, or, to transcribe from the language of music, from home (tonic) to the sun (dominant). This little drawing could be seen as an inversion of the struggle from figuration to abstraction that Kandinsky (and Kupka) judged to be based on musical example. This is the battle that raged around Duchamp in the year 1913: the Orphic translation into abstraction. The key difference is that for Duchamp, the point of departure is the given, the readymade, which, in the case of music, is the paper on which it is written. Unlike the purist modernists, for whom music’s abstracted sound, its non-materiality, was the paradigm, for Duchamp it was the opposite: music was grounded in the physical, in its visual aspect, its notation. The ideology of music as sound alone does not interest Duchamp, he is too much of an artist (rather than a painter) for that. He starts by playing with material, doodling on music paper, and from that extemporization, the cyclist rises up. Doodling is, of course, improvisation, a willingness to ‘listen’ to chance and emergent suggestion. However, this is not just any cyclist. I would suggest it is almost a portrait.48 It would be appropriate if it was a portrait (or, as Danto puts it, ‘a drawing out’) of the French professional road racing and track cyclist, the winner of the 1910 Tour de France, Octave Lapize (1887–1917).

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

229

Figure 5.3 Marcel Duchamp, Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the Sun), paper mounted on mat board, from The Box of 1914, 1913–14, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp, 1991-133-1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.

During the 1910 Tour de France race, while on the climb of the Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees, he is reported to have cried out to the invigilating officials: ‘Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, des assassins!’ The reason was that in 1906, Henri Desgrange, who had first devised the Tour de France as a promotional stunt for his cycling newspaper l’Auto three years earlier, was worried that the course had become too easy, so he extended it into the Pyrenees. Then he went further, and in 1910 added Col du Tourmalet, the highest mountain pass in the French Pyrenees. At 7,000 feet high and over 15 km long, this was a steep, precipitous, and serpentine addition to the route. Even Lapize, who had the reputation of being the best cycling mountain-climber alive, found it too much, and resorted to pushing his bike up part of this climb. Now a paved pass, in 1910 it was simply a dirt track, and the whole mountain section, in the baking heat of July 1910, totalled 326 km. Lapize completed the stage in 14 hours and 10 minutes, others finished after 18 hours in the dead of night. Despite Lapize winning the stage and the overall race (a prize of Fr 5,000), he was reported by one Parisian paper as saying, ‘Desgrange est vraiment un assassin’ (‘Desgrange is truly a murderer’).49

230

Improvision

Duchamp’s cyclist displays all of these characteristics: he is struggling up a twisting and turned slope, his head bent in effort, his legs worn away, and his name ‘Octave’ signifies the height he might achieve. However, he manages not eight notes, but just five in terms of the line of ascent, and the two dots on the stave formed by the back axel and the crank of the pedal (F to C or A to C etc.). The twist in the line behind Octave points to the road already travelled, and the climb in front, up 3 staves in total. But what Duchamp (and Octave) achieved through all this effort is a modulation from music’s abstract space over into art’s fictive space. He effectively reverses Kandinsky’s journey, and his doodled cyclist, Octave, ascends to image, even as his famous nude descended towards abstraction.50

Askew: A doodle and a Derridian diversion This diversion might itself be fashioned askew, as a doodle. Doodles have a long history, probably as long as human history, but in many ways they are fundamental to all art. E. H. Gombrich has pointed out that doodles bypass conceptions of mastery, for they are most often acts of distraction, and once mastery is abandoned as the criterion by which art might be judged, doodles come to tell us much about the relationship between expression and creativity, as they play in the space between intuition and experience.51 Indeed, Gombrich mentions Vasari’s claim that the very birth of visual art in the Renaissance was the consequences of doodles that developed in the works of the young artist Giovanni Cimabue: ‘But instead of studying his letters Cimabue spent all his time, as if inspired, covering his paper and books with pictures showing people, horses, houses, and various other things he dreamt up. And fortune certainly looked kindly on this instinctive talent.’52 Cimabue drew by fancy, was led by inspiration, perhaps tacitly rather than consciously, creating ex nihilo. While of limited historical accuracy, such an idea betrays the inclination to link the unschooled and the idea of the primitive with spontaneity and a fundamental creative urge, in ways we saw earlier in relation to the racist assumption of ‘instinctive’ music-making of African Americans. Not least among the attractions of doodling is the pleasure in rhythmical movement, resulting in abstract pattern-making – spirals, grids, wandering lines, etc. Thus doodling is, at root, fundamental to ‘drawing’ as an activity, as we saw in both Klee’s wandering line and Dove’s spiral scratch. In other words, doodling extracts design from autonomously created lines, which in themselves suggest subsequent lines, and lines can lead in many directions. Like Duchamp, but in a very different way, Klee recognized the close relationship between drawing and writing (and notation), ‘at the dawn of civilisation, when writing and drawing were the same thing, [line] was the basic element’.53 More recently Andy Goldsworthy has described drawing as, ‘At its most essential an exploring line alert to changes of rhythm and feeling of surface and space.’54 Thus, in execution drawing is a rhythmic, temporal exploration. I briefly mentioned, in the previous chapter, James Herbert’s discussion of ‘emergence’ in relation to mark-making, an idea he develops from the science of complexity. He describes it thus: ‘Emergence concerns the way in which the interactions

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

231

of simple behaviours at one level of a complex system can prompt unpredictable events at a higher level of the system that are qualitatively different from anything that exists at the lower level.’55 I commend his discussion for further detail, but for the purpose of this discussion it is enough to say doodles and drawing can also articulate this dialogue between simple behaviours and the provocation of much more complex outcomes. This tacit knowledge, which is often only accessible when an action is in a flow-state is, as we have seen, a key element of the process of improvisation. Doodles are a quintessential form of play, a distraction from straight thought, and as Gombrich argues, it is because doodling is not fully under conscious control, in a state of distracted attention, that it is so often felt to be relaxing. In this way it is a displacement activity, where something emerges while you are looking askew. Within emerging Surrealist conceptions, of course, the doodle modulates to the status of ‘automatic drawing’, as a route to the unconscious and the soul of creativity. But it is more common than that and is fundamental to all gestural abstraction. It is Klee’s ‘Eine aktive Linie, die sich frei ergeht, ein Spaziergang um seiner selbst willen, ohne Ziel’ (an active line, moving freely, goes for a stroll on its own, without destination).56 Doodled history is even more serpentine than Octave’s ascent. Avoir l’Apprenti, like many of Duchamp’s smaller works, gives this impression of originating in a doodle. Works such as Encore à cet astre appear to have formed as an improvised image. It does not much matter if this is the case or not, for it is impossible for the casual viewer to delineate improvised from non-improvised doodles, but the inspiration of ‘drawing’ on chance was a process pursued by Duchamp across his career. Duchamp himself later explained (in a phrase derived from recording technology and jazz) that he aspired, ‘Not to be engaged in any groove(s).’ He went on, ‘I want to be free, and I want to be free for myself, foremost.’57 This approach is an idea that Schwarz relates to Keats’s notion of ‘Negative Capability’; the state of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without the irritable reaching after fact & reason’.58 Doodling and play are key processes in a type of thinking that allows negative capability without reaching after fact and reason, without travelling in a straight line. This same point was later articulated by Derrida, who saw freedom as consisting of both following rules and breaking them,59 and for him improvisation raised the same issues, as he claimed in an interview in 1982: It’s not easy to improvise, it’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one’s place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already pre-programmed. It’s already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say whatever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible. And there, where there is improvisation, I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it is what I will see – no, I won’t see it, it is for others to see. The one who has improvised here, no, I won’t ever see him.60

232

Improvision

To improvise it is necessary to be present in the moment, not to think consciously of outcomes, but to work askew. In this state of flow we cannot stand outside and see ourselves, we cannot obtain an objective position but must embrace a subjectivity. As Herbert puts it, ‘As with hands, so with the tools of palette and brush. Midconcerto, Joshua Bell has no idea where his bow might be; Tiger Woods pays no heed to the location of his club midswing (were they to stop and think about it too much they would surely falter).’ How much more this is the case in a real-time compositional state. Derrida was a jazz lover, but extremely reluctant to write on music; ‘music is the object of my strongest desire, and yet at the same time it remains completely forbidden. I don’t have the competence, I don’t have any truly presentable musical culture. Thus my desire remains completely paralyzed.’61 Elsewhere he specified, ‘I enjoy listening to jazz a lot . . . but it is a foreign world to me; I would never permit myself to write on jazz.’62 Despite not writing directly on jazz, as the above quote makes clear, he was repeatedly drawn to consider the nature of improvisation. Fundamental to his starting point in these discussions is the challenge to the incorrect assumption that jazz improvisation is singular and immediate, instinctive and unconscious and therefore requires little skill or discipline; and that such an assumption often carries racist undertones. Rather, as Herbert shows, a skilled artist, whether painter or musician, utilises an enormous ‘accretion of habituated procedures’, and I would add, knowledge. What Derrida is interested in exposing is the simplistic belief that improvisation is unfettered freedom, just ‘made up’; rather, it is ‘made up’ (or collaged) from pre-existing elements, a type of phronesis, but in improvisation the process of positioning these elements is key. In music such elements might be harmony, rhythm, melody, the nature and limits of the instrument and of technique, and from the pressure imagination could exert on those very elemental concepts. To carry out improvisation, a sophisticated understanding of these elements, their relationships and ramifications is necessary, which is where phronesis comes in.63 One gets closer through awareness, rather than ignorance, but in the process of deployment they need to be ‘forgotten’, or seen askew, so that some originality may emerge.64 The key to Derrida’s conception of improvisation is in the inevitable relationship that exists within it between repetition and alterity; or, more generally, the conceptual links between alterity, singularity and uniqueness, and to rules, laws and repetition: ‘If the act of invention can take place only once, the invented artefact must be essentially repeatable, transmissible, and transposable. The two extreme types of invented things, the mechanical apparatus on the one hand,65 the fictional or poetic narrative on the other, imply both a first time and every time, the inaugural event and iterability.’66 There is, in other words, an inevitable tension between the singular event and the non-singular process of communication (which may also be present in Dove’s record paintings). So ‘pure’, wholly unique, spontaneous creation is not possible, any more than is the total absence of rules or laws. This is especially true in music or language, because words and notes pre-exist the moment of performance or ‘invention’, and are then reordered in composition or the process of improvisation (and then fixed on disc). There is no creatio ex nihilo moment of birth. In an interview between Ornette Coleman and Derrida there is the following exchange:

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

233

JD: Perhaps you will agree with me on the fact that the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible. OC: That’s true. JD: I am not an ‘Ornette Coleman expert,’ but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus, there is a repetition in the work that is intrinsic to the initial creation – that which compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in improvisation: thus, when people want to trap you between improvisation and the pre-written, they are wrong. OC: Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.67

It is interesting that Coleman answers by way of an analogy; something that revolves, repeating its movement, but never repeating exactly the same: each day is different. The recognition of repetition, codification and invention is, Derrida maintains, the responsibility of the other. Legitimization is the role of someone else, not the creator, most often the reader or listener, and this is unpredictable and uncontrollable by definition. As Derrida put it above, ‘I won’t see it, it is for others to see.’ Additionally, legitimization of invention is also an act of co-creation, as Duchamp also recognized, for invention cannot be private, it must be certified by the other. The question of the first time ever, or what constitutes the ‘new’, is, for Derrida, the crux of the question. An invention needs an inaugural event and thereafter it needs a ‘system of conventions that will ensure for it . . . its recording in a common history, its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a lineage, . . . Invention begins by being susceptible to repetition.’68 On 1 July 1997, Derrida participated directly in a jazz event (see Figure 5.4). Strange as it may seem, the ‘father’ of free jazz, Ornette Coleman, had invited Derrida to join him on stage at the La Villette in Paris during the jazz festival, where Coleman was the headline act. This followed a week of private meetings between them (during which the above-mentioned interview took place). A mutual interest in jazz and improvisation were not all they had in common. They might both be considered askew in respect of their respective ‘traditions’ (jazz and philosophy), they were of the same cultural generation, and by coincidence exactly the same age, both born in 1930. Despite these links, the audience, unsurprisingly, did not perceive them as a duet, and was unsympathetic and unprepared for the ‘interruption’ (as they saw it) in Coleman’s set, when a white-haired man wandered on stage with no instrument in hand. Derrida’s participation was not listed in the festival programme and Coleman failed to introduce him, but simply turned to the wings after the end of one piece to indicate his entrance. Derrida was largely unknown to the jazz audience when he took to the stage to perform his ‘talk’, or more accurately, to initiate what he hoped would be a dialogue (duet?) with Coleman about improvisation.

234

Improvision

Figure 5.4 Christian Ducasse, photograph taken at the concert at La Villette, Paris, 1 July 1997. Derrida far right, Coleman centre and Joachim Kühn far left.

His side of the performance was a text called Joue – Le Prénom delivered in both French and English, which was to be interlaced with Coleman’s musical rejoinders.69 However, Derrida’s dissonant tone, in terms of the dominance of lexis over melos and his occupation of a ‘domain’ very different from that of Colman and his band, resulted in him being booed and jerreed off stage before he had finished ‘reading’. Derrida found this a very unpleasant experience and recalled it with sadness – ‘une espèce de rejet compulsif ’. It starts: Qu’est-ce qui arrive? What’s happening? What’s going to happen, Ornette, now, right now? What’s happening to me, here, now, with Ornette Coleman? With you? Who? It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise well [II faut bien improviser, il faut bien improviser]. I knew that Ornette was going to call on me to join him tonight, he told me so when we met to talk one afternoon last week. This chance frightens me, I have no idea what’s going to happen. It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise but well, this is already a music lesson, your lesson, Ornette, that unsettles our old idea of improvisation – what’s more, I believe that you have come to judge it ‘racist’, this ancient and naive idea of improvisation. I think I understand what you meant by that. Not the word or the thing ‘improvisation’ but rather the concept, its metaphysical or ideological implementation [mise en oeuvre].

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

235

As all of you see, I have here a sort of written score, you think that I am not improvising, well, you are wrong. I am pretending not to improvise, I just pretend, I play at reading, but by improvising. Regarding Prime Time, one day Ornette said that the written parts are as improvised as the improvisations themselves. That is a great lesson, your lesson, on what’s happening – when it’s happening: to the improviser, unforeseeably, without seeing it coming, unpredictably.70

Derrida refers to the history of the reception of jazz improvisation as racist, a ‘naive’ idea of real freedom. Instead, Derrida reads that he is improvising, or not, that he is playing at reading and mentions more than once ‘seeing . . . as all of you see’; and later contradicts this by saying that improvisation is ‘unforeseeable’, ‘without seeing it coming’. The text is littered with stops and starts, contradictions, repetitions of phrases, the titles of Coleman’s pieces – the missing first name, the proper name (of Coleman’s mother). Reading the text, it is not surprising it went down badly. It is typical Derrida: dense, punning, closely argued, playful, self-reflexive. He misjudged his audience. By way of recuperation, Derrida and Coleman gave an interview on the subject of improvisation and the event to the French publication Jazz Magazine entitled ‘Le Musicien, le philosophe et les fanatiques’.71 The text of the ‘improvisation’ and the interview between Derrida and Coleman appeared in Les Inrockuptibles under the title ‘La Langue de l’autre’ (the language of the other).72 The performance was effectively a riff on the relationship between the script of a reading (a pre-existing text) and the performance of a spontaneous, improvised talk (an invented speech), and between Derrida’s voice and Coleman’s saxophone. In a later reflection on the event Derrida, still deeply affected by the ‘performance’, wrote, ‘It was in Paris, but no voyage will ever have taken me so far away, myself and my body and my words, onto an unknown stage, without any possible rehearsal.’73 The unknown element of improvisation and, importantly, the event/performance itself, resulted in simultaneously a kind of failure, but also a kind of success. While he never got to finish reading his text, the ‘event itself ’, so to speak, took over from the ‘reflection’, the exegesis, and provided a true improvisatory, unplanned and externally generated interlude. The failed performance became paradigmatic of the dialogic nature of improvisation – the music, the philosopher and the final word of the audience. We could also reframe the opposition at the heart of the event in musical terms, as the difference between a traditional ‘classical’ musical conception, grounded in absolute music and a score, and a jazz one (the spontaneity of performance); in other words, a resistance between the idea of the score as the source of meaning, and the improvisatory unique event, between a passive (receptive) and an active (interventionist) audience. Resistance is key here because all performance events produce chance elements, no matter how closely a score is attended, but a traditional classical concert does not invite aleatoric elements in the way many jazz performances do. While the talk was scripted, equally it might not have been. The audience had no way of knowing one way or the other, a fact Derrida acknowledged in the script, which was also of course true of Coleman’s musical performance.

236

Improvision

As we saw, Derrida’s text inscribes the opening with a question in French, repeated in English: ‘Qu’est-ce qui arrive? What’s happening? What’s going to happen, Ornette, now, right now? . . . This chance frightens me, I have no idea what’s going to happen’ and he didn’t. As David Wills postulates, the audience may well have lost patience with him at the point he says, ‘I am pretending not to improvise.’ Because to pretend is to fly in the face of the trust that is offered to the audience to an improvising musician, it breaks an invisible contract. Of course, you can not see improvisation. It is invisible, the performance looks the same one way or the other. But Derrida contrarily claims that he plays at reading. To an audience expecting ‘free’ improvisation, no reading of music, this must have been a red rag. But Derrida’s point (and Coleman’s as quoted above) is that such absolute, pure freedom is never possible; that a sharp distinction between what is written and what is performed cannot be made. As Derrida notes, ‘Ornette once said about Prime Time that the written parts are as improvised as the improvisations themselves.’74 Derrida in turn had no way of knowing how the performance would be received by the audience. Reception is beyond the control of the script, or text, and he opened up to this possibility even more by framing his remarks as a dialogue.75 He reads, so therefore repeats, but each reading (and this one especially) is unique and unpredictable. He performs a paradox so that if he is telling the truth he is lying, and if lying he is telling a truth; he reads that he is not reading but improvising, recognizing that all improvisation is a form of re-inscription. Once an improvisation is recognized as an improvisation, it is mediated by cultural knowledge, but of course, such knowledge is required even to allow its recognition in the first place. Coleman was, like Derrida, well known for proposing a permeable border between jazz improvisation and written composition, and his music aesthetic promoted the extremes of such a juxtaposition. From a reception point of view, what is particularly interesting is the unwillingness to change modes of listening by the audience. However, the openness to creativity, to new possibilities and interdisciplinary dialogue, and both Derrida’s and Coleman’s willingness to make themselves vulnerable to chance, signalled an awareness of the rich possibilities that can be sought between lexis, melos, script, performance and reception; an awareness that returns us to Duchamp. In Duchamp’s text ‘The Creative Act’ (1957), the identity and definition of the artist was crucial to the perception of them as a conduit, as a guide to meaning, not a dictator of it. ‘If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness of the esthetic (sic) plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it.’ And a little later, ‘In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle towards the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.’ He explains that the difference between intention and realization is the pre-refined ‘art coefficient’: a coefficient that produces art (neither good, bad nor indifferent), but the ‘weight’ of the work on the ‘esthetic scale’ is only made by the spectator. ‘All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications, and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

237

For Duchamp it is not a turning to ‘inner necessity’, as it was for Kandinsky, not an access to inner experience provided by the artist to be reflected in the spectator. Rather it is for the artist to create, as Derrida and Coleman did, a work which is in dialogue with the spectator, and thus to push open shifting, varied and diverse interpretations.

New objects As Kandinsky strove to meet the ‘condition of music’ with a new object for art, one that replaced natural appearance as a hook to hang art on, Duchamp answered with the found object, the readymade. In the case of ‘Bottle Rack’ (1914), this was literally a hook on which to hang art. But, as we shall see, his very first readymade, Bicycle Wheel of 1913, promised the possibility of sound, unlike Kandinsky’s silent, symphonic spaces. Bicycle Wheel (see Figure 5.5) did not strive to go up hill, instead it was up-ended. It is, strictly speaking, an ‘assisted readymade’, and as Duchamp himself put it: ‘The Bicycle Wheel is my first Ready-made, so much so that at first it wasn’t even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Ready-made. Rather, it had more to do with the idea of chance.’76 It relates to the aesthetic of Erratum Musical and may be thought additionally among the first examples of kinetic art, but it is also linked specifically to the condition of music. While Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his Laokoön oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1767), may have divided the arts along spatial and temporal lines, cutting music off from visual art, Duchamp’s first readymade was partly contrived to pass the time, like a doodle. In his own words, he found it ‘very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day . . . I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace . . . it has the attraction of something moving in the room while you think about something else’.77 It was in this sense a sculptural doodle, a device for looking askew, for not going in a straight line. It moves but goes nowhere, and what is more it might sound, not just from the friction of movement, the squeak of the wheel, but also from the almost irresistible temptation to stick a pencil against the spokes.78 It is not just a kinetic sculpture, it is a sound sculpture, that sounds and may not sound; but even if not sounding it still maintains musical qualities. It was perceptively described by Lawrence Steefel,79 quoted in Schwarz, as an offspring of the Coffee Mill, but one that has ‘both a new autonomy of self-transformation, and also a new submissiveness to the control of the artist. Its effects are more immediate, in a “musical” sense, than are those of the painted panel, but the intervention of the spectator as a manipulative force is also more physical.’ Later in the same entry he continues: In its transformations from sculpture to an appearance like painting, Bicycle Wheel seems to link the subjective world of dreams and the objective world of things . . . By maintaining its own frame of reference (the rim and axial rotation), this ‘selfcentered’ object develops, within its frame or ‘magic circle’, abstract qualities of rhythmic motion which are of a musical order of perceptions which have not yet become knowledge.80

238

Improvision

Figure 5.5 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1964 (replica of 1913 original), wheel, painted wood, 50 1/2 × 25 × 12 1/2 in. (128.3 × 63.5 × 31.8 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Galleria Schwarz, 1964, 1964-175-1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp.

It is thus liminal in its position between painting and sculpture, between the subjectivism of abstraction and the ‘objective’ move to a machine aesthetic. It forms a bridge between orphic painterly and sculptural concern, but an approach that maintains a ‘musicalist’ aesthetic. Further, the wheel might be considered a form of musical instrument, and one that is performed, but not so much by the artist as by the audience. It is played by an interpreter, just as music and musical instruments are, and perceived as musical in its abstract kinetic movement. While Derrida and Coleman riffed between words and music, for Duchamp, words were always sonic as well as cognitive entities:

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

239

Just the sound of these words alone begins a chain reaction. For me, words are not merely a means of communication. You know, puns have always been considered a low form of wit, but I find them a source of stimulation both because of their actual sound and because of unexpected meanings attached to the inter-relationships of disparate words. For me, this is an infinite field of joy – and it’s always right at hand. Sometimes four or five different levels of meaning come through.81

Words look and mean differently but sound the same – conception and sight are pulled together by sound and the music of language. The ‘musicalist’ rotating aesthetic of the Bicycle Wheel was later developed in his 1925 work Discs Bearing Spirals, a variation on the earlier ‘precision optics series’, and the Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) of 1920. The Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) of 1925, was eventually abandoned due to mechanical (rather than aesthetic) problems in designing the most effective rotation device. In his attempt to solve these rotational problems pragmatically, it occurred to Duchamp that a more effective engineering solution was to be found inside the homes of an increasing number of people: the gramophone or record player. What Duchamp recognized was the possibility of hijacking a piece of machinery designed for a specifically auditory function and replacing the record with a disc designed for a specifically visual function. When these discs are rotated at 33 1/3 rpm, they give the visual impression of three-dimensional objects. Thus, a liminal effect was created by the ‘performer’ transforming the flat two-dimensional drawing (of the artist) into a quasi-sculptural object or effect. The Discs Bearing Spirals are a twin of the painterly and sculptural qualities of the Bicycle Wheel; as Steefel recognized, they are transformed by the performer. It should be noted that Vertigo records, a UK subsidiary of Philips launched in 1969, which specialized in non-mainstream music, originally had a Duchamp-like spiral logo in the middle of all their discs. The idea spread further than Duchamp might have originally thought.82 The results of this record-player artwork were developed in Duchamp’s film Anémic Cinéma (1925–6), which he made with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, and which further linked this painterly-sculptural effect with text. Here Duchamp contrasted the threedimensional effect with the flat screen by alternating spiral discs with ‘verbal’ discs inscribed with puns. The three-dimensional effect was even more pronounced in this context, against the ‘flat’ presentation of words. However, the words, in order to be recognized as puns, must sound in the viewer’s head, so in the sense they are lifted away from the screen and performed by the audience, and they too developed dimensionally. This experiment was repeated in 1935 in the final iteration of the series with the Rotoreliefs. Here the record player was again used, which led Michel Leiris to define these discs as ‘records to be looked at, not to be heard at’.83 This plays out Duchamp’s aphorism previously mentioned, ‘One can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing’; we might add ‘One can see hearing; one can’t hear looking’ . . . perhaps. The impact of the Bicycle Wheel is significant and Duchamp himself recognized this: ‘Obviously, the wheel must have had a great influence on my mind, because I used it almost all the time from then on, not only there, but also in the Chocolate Grinder, and later on in the Rotoreliefs.’84

240

Improvision

In the instruction for the activation of the Rotorelief, Duchamp refers to the turntable as the ‘turnstile of the long-playing record machine’. The turntable is a turnstile in that it limits the viewers to view one at a time (something he also did in his final artwork Étant donnés). Not only one viewer, but ideally one eye. In the guidance notes he points out, ‘the optical illusion will be greater with one eye, rather than two’.85 When we discussed the record paintings of Dove in the previous chapter, we noted how important it was that such music was experienced as a social activity. For Duchamp the substitution of sight for sound produced a solo individual viewer experience.

Part 2: Objects, Gesture and Rhythm The tension that exists between the conceptions of Bicycle Wheel and a Kandinsky Improvisation are played out through the history of twentieth-century visual art. Their similarly complex relationship to conditions of music is likewise deep-running and multifaceted. In this final section I offer a few stopping-off points en route to the present and the work of the contemporary French painter Fabienne Verdier.

Part 2a: Objects The artist Shigeko Kubota, who was married to Nam June Paik, produced a work that takes the form of an affiliation between Duchamp and Paik. Kubota was an important Japanese artist, video pioneer and member of New York’s Fluxus circle. Like Paik, she had also studied music and brought into her visual art a musical sensibility that permeated her performance and sight-sound aesthetic. Between 1973 and 1990 she produced a series of ‘Duchampiana’, on the playing of chess, on doors, staircases and bicycles. In her Bicycle Wheel, exactly seventy years after Duchamp’s (1983), she attached a small 5-inch colour video monitor (or monitors, in other versions, 1990) to the spokes of a moving bicycle wheel fixed to a stool. This was a doubly assisted readymade, one that put a woman’s voice at the heart of the found object, and gave a look in two directions, to the monitor and from the monitor, to the past and the future. While John Cage was an influential figure on this inter-art aesthetic, the quiet impact of jazz, and especially the developing aesthetics around ‘free jazz’ (as discussed in relation to Coleman), should not be underestimated. In Europe in the 1960s, free jazz represented a key cultural moment. It especially appealed to European sensibilities, for two principle reasons. On the one hand, there was what was perceived as a return to ontological ‘basics’, especially rhythmic freedoms, which were seen within AfricanAmerican sensibilities as essentially African in their polytemporality. On the other hand, a harmonic and tonal patterning that resembled the post-diatonic (postSchoenberg) experiments of composed European avant-garde music of the previous decade, especially that around Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen. In the process of this, standard jazz forms broke down, with an interest in melodic improvisation being replaced by an emphasis on timbral complexity, and a dissolving of beat and regular metre into a phase of irregular cross rhythms. Emotional intensity and subjective

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

241

expression were fundamental to many performers, and this element becomes much more important for those artists working with concepts of expressionism, a discussion of which will conclude this chapter. The ‘liberation’ of European jazz musicians from American models was expedited by a growing critical stance against America over the Vietnam war, along with the technical revolution in jazz that brought it closer to European ‘art’ music. This is especially evident in the music of Peter Brötzmann, whose most well-known recording brings both these elements together. ‘Machine Gun’ was first released in 1968, a year of political turmoil in both Paris and Germany, with the student uprising, and emergency laws being passed during the German ‘Grand Coalition’. It was performed by a claustrophobic, compact octet with parts doubled: two bass players, Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall, and two drummers, Sven-Åke Johanssona and Han Bennink; or tripled: three reed players, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker and Willem Breuker, and with Fred Van Hove on piano. While initially giving the impression of a wall of sound, with no real melodic lines or tonal centres, closer listening reveals subtle exchanges and fast-flowing conversations between the performers, as well as a range of ‘licks’ from a variety of jazz precedents. The title ‘Machine Gun’ is in part a reference to Don Cherry’s description of Brötzmann’s rapid staccato-tonguing technique, and it is also shared with a piece written a couple of years later by the American electric guitarist Jimi Hendrix. There are deeper aesthetic links between the guitarist and Brötzmann’s album, however, and perhaps the most eloquent counterpoint is in terms of timbre. This is clear in the distortions, feed-back, bomb and machine gun effects in Hendrix’s famous live version of the American national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner, which took place at the Woodstock Festival the following year, 1969.86 In both cases, the incorporation of timbral density, distortion and the sheer physicality of the performance stand out. Like aspects of Picabia’s and Duchamp’s aesthetic, music here aspires to the condition of machine in its mimetic ambition. Brötzmann began a career as an artist before turning to music. He studied art in Wuppertal and in 1963 he first made contact with Nam June Paik. Brötzmann was employed by Paik to help with the installation and operation of his first major solo exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, which took place 11–20 March 1963. Later he turned to focus more on music while maintaining an active identity as an artist, as he has to the present. The exhibition was housed in a gallery run by the architect Rolf Jährling called Gallery Parnass at 67 Moltkestrasse in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. The house, a spacious Art Nouveau villa, accommodated the architectural practice, the gallery and a private apartment where Jährling lived with his wife Anneliese. The exhibition ran for ten days and was open 7.30–9.30 pm, just as a concert or gig might be.87 Spreading beyond the gallery to the rest of the house visitors where first greeted by a severed ox-head hung at the front door, its decomposition was another form of de-composition in a different temporal space from the musical instruments and TVs.88 The entrance hall contained prepared pianos, including one playable instrument made by Ibach, the oldest piano manufacturer in the world, that was attacked by an axe-wielding Joseph Beuys on the opening night of the exhibition, the wreckage of which Paik left in the hall. Other

242

Improvision

works were spread throughout the house, even invading the bathroom and toilet. This array of works included the four ‘prepared’ or destroyed pianos, records and music tape installations, thirteen modified TV sets and other mechanical and sound objects. The show was conceived, and received, as a type of Gesamtkunstwerk, but a radical riposte to Wagnerian sensibilities: a total event which extended to the continuous changes imposed upon the objects (especially the pianos and TVs) through the interaction of Paik, Brötzmann and other artists, as well as the visitors (including Beuys). Brötzmann and others were engaged in the ‘performance’ of the exhibition throughout its run. Many of Paik’s works in this exhibition follow Duchamp’s notion of the readymade, but in Paik’s case, rather than exposing the sound-potential of objects, his ‘assisted’ readymades worked in the opposite direction, to interfere visually with musical instruments and records, and to allow sound to interfere with the vision of TVs. In addition, they function as ‘assisted readymades’ in the sense that they need the viewer to ‘assist’ in their ‘performance’. ‘There is this big John Cage, and there is Stockhausen and Kagel, and in the field of modern music there might be no place for me.’89 When Paik recognized that his best contribution might lie, not in conventional music-making or composition, but as an artist (rather as Duchamp recognized that his identity was not as a painter but as an artist), Paik subtly shifted ontology. He came to view music from a different angle. This conceptual category ‘artist’, as Duchamp defined it, was related to making, to making a choice, and Paik turned from musician to artist, but took his musical sensibilities with him. Like Duchamp, who builds from the ‘given’ of music (for him it is manuscript paper), what Paik builds from, his musical ‘given’, is the musical instrument. For both artists, these ‘givens’ are necessary before there can be music. So, rather than thinking of sound as the essence of music (as the purist strain of modernism would define it), Paik thought first of context and objects. What is needed to make music? Performers, audience and instruments. Paik’s aesthetic is not essentialist; it is constructed from material, from objects, it is the putting together of stuff. Before his first, seminal one-man show, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television in 1963, Paik had concentrated on a number of ‘musical’ performances culminating in the Neo-Dada in der Musik event in Düsseldorf in 1962, where he definitively deconstructed a violin in his One for Violin Solo. This act effectively, and dramatically, unmade the readymade violin, and constitutes perhaps his most ‘performed’ work.90 In addition to the piano, it is the violin that is most often singled out by Paik for artistic reconsideration. Violins have a particular aura of preciousness and public profile in terms of value. They reflect a high degree of craftsmanship; they are often extremely valuable, frequently unique, but sometimes mass-produced. They are objects of high cultural status, deeply involved in artistic symbolism, often in relation to sexuality, but also to the passing of time and hence mortality.91 The names Guarnerius and Stradivarius summon up value in the minds of many (the most expensive violin so far sold is the 1721 ‘Lady Blunt’ Stradivarius, which fetched $15.9 million at auction in 2011).92 Rather than more mechanical wind instruments, the parts that wear out on a violin, such as strings, can easily be replaced without affecting value. The continuity lineage of such instruments is significant, as instruments are passed from performer to performer and from generation to generation (if rarely, now, owned by the performers).

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

243

The 1743 Guarneri ‘Carrodus del Gesù’, for example, is named after the English violinist John Carrodus, who owned it until his death in 1895.93 Modern luthiers in many ways rival their eighteenth-century colleagues, but their instruments, while very close in quality, rarely match the older instruments’ kudos.94 Such musical instruments are therefore a particularly complex category of ‘readymade’. The violin is an instrument equally at home in the hands of improvising musicians in jazz, as it is with the virtuosi of classical music. The violin was utilized from the dawn of jazz, with significant early innovators like Jimmy Palao (1879–1925), Eddie South (1904–62), Snuff Smith (1909–67) and Joe Venuti (1903–78), and the equally important European players such as Stéphane Grappelli (1908–97), fellow Frenchman Michel Warlop (1911–47) and the Dane Sven Asmussen (1916–2017).95 Jazz violin has been especially at home in France, where Grappelli established a distinctive voice that defined a rapprochement between jazz and classical music-making that is especially appropriate in a European context.96 The violin connects to all of these categories, and Paik’s choice was well made. By the time of Exposition of Music – Electronic Television in 1963, he had one more outing with a violin before he turned to the use of pianos, that other pillar of both the Western instrumental and jazz tradition. In Zen for Walking, Paik took a violin for a walk by adding a fifth string to its usual four (Figure 5.6). The work allows Paik to engage in the same sort of play with purist modernism as Duchamp did in his drawing of a cyclist. Here Paik refers to the place of music in the work of Kandinsky’s great friend and fellow Master at the Bauhaus, the Swiss artist Paul Klee. In developing a pedagogic programme for his students, Klee utilized his considerable knowledge of music. As a skilled violinist, Klee knew how music might act as a technical model for his abstracted art; his pedagogic method is grounded, in part, on the example of the eighteenth-century Austrian musician Johann Joseph Fux’s theoretical writings Gradus Ad Parnassum.97 As we discussed earlier, Klee famously referred to drawing, the backbone of his art, as ‘an active line, moving freely, on a stroll on its own, without destination’. In Violin with String Paik dragged his musical background behind him, moving freely, on a stroll, improvising, deconstructing, much as Klee did, but to rather different ends. Paik extended music into a world of action, not just objects. He decomposes the violin through action. He uses non-musical, but sound-producing action, to ‘play’ (with) musical instruments, and since all sound can be music post-Cage, he marks up the nature of this cultural, not ontological distinction. He rightly understood the musical instrument as a type of prosthetic, intimately connected to the body and identity of the musician. In order to acquire profound, tacit knowledge, performers make no distinction between body and instrument. The jazz trumpeter Earl Cross puts it especially starkly in describing his efforts to master his instrument: ‘When I become my instrument and my instrument becomes me, I’m not a person anymore. I would like to walk around the street looking like a trumpet if possible, because that’s what I am.’98 In the exhibition Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, Paik presented four prepared pianos, one of which lay on its back with its strings exposed. Visitors were invited to ‘play’ it, not with their hands, but with their feet, to walk on and over it. Inside it, as Figure 5.6 shows, Paik left his violin with a string; two musical objects in duet

244

Improvision

Figure 5.6 Nam June Paik, Zen for Walking, action with a violin on a string, staged during N. J. Paik: Exposition of Music, Galerie Parnass 1963. Photo © montwéART.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

245

which are involved with feet, walking being inscribed as a key action in this musical context. Walking as a ‘musical’ strategy in Paik’s aesthetic is related to the contemporary Situationist interest in developing aesthetic tactics to combat the alienating effects of capitalism, central to which was the orchestration of the urban fabric through walking that would ‘nurture the improvisation, play and creativity of its citizens’.99 The idea of undirected walking uses the concept of dérive, which relates to jazz improvisation by encouraging creativity through chance encounters and promoting the effects of the environment and interlocutors on creative decisions. Guy Debord recommends ‘dérive/ drifting’ in small groups, where ‘one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters that they find there’,100 a description of creativity wholly in tune with Ornette Coleman’s aesthetic. Paik’s exhibition, and the works in it, were predicated on a similar type of improvisation between an artist and instruments, allowing for input by the viewer/ audience/performer. John Cage said of Paik that, ‘His life is devoted . . . not to sounds, but to objects.’ He continued, in relation to Paik’s pianos, ‘Paik’s prepared piano . . . is in a museum, not in a concert hall. It is to be seen rather than heard.’101 But that is not entirely true. While Paik promoted ‘objectness’, his musical instruments did once sound. In addition there were other ‘sounding’ works in the exhibition. In ‘Random Access’ Paik fixed over fifty strips of pre-recorded audiotape to a wall in the Jährling gallery, producing a sound mural, and invited visitors to run a hand-held playback head, wired to speakers, along the strips, in whatever direction and at whatever tempos they chose. Thus, Paik made time spatial and linked sound to drawing. The same principle was extended to Gramophone records, where the arm of the record player was detached to allow the visitors to play the records in their own time. Another variation on this theme is adopted in Schallplattenschaschlik (‘Record shish-kebab’), where a radio supports a motor with a tape spool that rotates the record stacks which are played by a hand-held record player arm. Listening to music, therefore, breaks temporal sequence by redistribution in space, and shifts perspective from ‘passive’ consumption to ‘active’ creation. In both cases the visitor is invited to draw the music/ sound out, making sound as an artist might make a line or image; the sound is traced. Perhaps the most radical of these works was Paik’s ‘Mouth Music’. Here, with closed eyes, Paik hears the sound of the record through the vibrations accessed via his mouth and the jaw bones. He holds a modified record tone arm, transformed into an explicitly phallic object, in his mouth, which he touches to a rotating record on a Gramophone turntable. In the ‘performance’ of this piece/object, Paik changes the rpm with his left hand to speed up and slow down the record, and thus ‘plays’ the recording, recomposing whatever is traced in lines on the vinyl; making his own music. This is no less hearing than it would be through the air via the ears, but here it also engages the tongue and embraces a more physical, phenomenal, sexual and synaesthetic approach to experiencing music. This underlines Paik’s interest in thinking of music as a holistic art, one not limited, or restricted to sound alone, and one that embraces the sexualized and physical body, rather than the disembodied spirituality of Kandinsky. In addition, what

246

Improvision

is usually a social and shared act of musical listening now becomes entirely private, interior, composed and consumed by the ‘listener’, by Paik himself, a fact emphasized by his closed eyes cutting out further exterior distraction. What this first major exhibition demonstrated so clearly was Paik’s Orphic sensibility, placing music at the service of visual art. In the essay on Paik quoted above, John Cage sums this up well, recognizing this sensibility’s extension across Paik’s entire oeuvre: ‘In fact the most musical of Paik’s works are those for which he has given no performance directions, for which the accompanist is simply the sounds of the environment. I am thinking of the ones which are just sculpture, TV Chair, TV Buddha, for instance.’102 This is what Paik did: he saw music as an art of actions, not just of sounds. Sounds may or may not be present, but following the lead of Cage’s own 4ʹ33ʺ, even if there is no ‘sound’, that does not mean there is no music. This is what it means to say that Paik takes his notion of ‘musicality’ with him into his identity as an artist. To return to Exposition of Music – Electronic Television as a paradigm case, the title itself is worth pause. I want to focus on the first word: an ‘exposition of music’ is not a common phrase. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘exposition’ has five meanings, and a number of sub-categories, of particular note are: 1.b) The action of putting (a child) out in the open; abandonment to chance. 3.a) The action of putting out to public view; an instance of this; a display, show, exposure. b) . . . Exhibition. 4.c) Music . . . the statement of the musical material on which a movement is based. 5.a) The action of expounding or explaining; interpretation, explanation. Also an instance or mode of this; an explanation, interpretation.103

Paik’s title thus links music (definition 4) and vision (definition 3), as music and television, with his new aesthetic presented to the public (definition 5) and allowing for improvisation and chance (definition 1). Curator Youngchul Lee also reminds us that the entrance poster for this exhibition had a particular typography: EXP osition of music EL ectronic television104

Thus, the highlighted letters spell EXPEL: this is exhibition as exposition and expulsion. In other words, it forms a simultaneous presentation and removal; it presents music as vision and not traditionally as sound. It also required the participation of the viewer, as discussed earlier: ‘The beauty of moving theatre lies in this “surprise a priori”, because almost all of the audience is uninvited, not knowing what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer – or better speaking – organizer, composer, player.’105 In addition, Paik also stated that exposition was a situation in which ‘the sounds sit, the audience plays or attacks them’, as opposed to his ‘action music’ where ‘the sounds, etc., move, the audience is attacked by me’.106 Music needs not just objects but players and audience, and both Paik’s musical instruments and his TVs always require audience as players. We should perhaps think

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

247

of the TVs as ‘video players’ and musical instruments as ‘audio players’. The preparation of the pianos rendered them democratic; to be creatively interacted with by any visitor, irrespective of their instrumental technique and ability. In the same year as this exhibition, 1963, Paik wrote in Post Music: The Monthly Review of the University of the Avant-garde Hinduism: New Ontology of Music:107 I am tired of renewing the form of music. – serial or aleatoric, graphic or five lines, instrumental or bellcanto (sic), screaming or action, tape or live . . . I hope must renew the ontological form of music.

While Paik did not renew the form of music by inventing new techniques, as Schoenberg did with serialism, and Cage did by employing aleatoricism, Paik developed a new ontology of music by exhibiting it, making visible its objects and etiquettes and by playing with them in new ways. The full meaning of musicality lies in the way in which Paik took up the logic of Duchamp’s claim to a different musicality for modern art. This musicality and sensibility has significant affinities with jazz, even if that was never an explicit aim of Paik’s aesthetic. Central to his art was the idea of ‘Global Groove’, explicitly manifest in two versions, the seminal 1973 video, and a continuation of the same ideas in the 2004 Guggenheim installation in Berlin. At a time of so-called ‘Brexit’ in Britain, it is sad to write of the more inclusive, mutually tolerant and multi-perceptive ambitions of Paik’s 1970 manifesto, ‘Global Groove and the Video Common Market’. This document forms the theoretical backdrop to his ‘Global Groove’ project. Anticipating the world wide web, he offers a now familiar argument about the biased representation on TV of Asian faces (the same is true of Black faces more generally), that they only occur as either ‘miserable refugees, wretched prisoners or hated dictators’. His model for this new ‘video common market’ (an audiovisual phenomenon) is music. He writes, citing jazz first: Jazz was the first tie between Blacks and Whites. Mozart was the first tie between Europeans and Asians. Beethoven was the last tie between Germans and Americans during World War II. Currently rock music is the only channel between young and old. But the power of music as a non-verbal communications medium has been wasted as much as were the vast resources under the ocean. Therefore, if we could assemble a weekly television festival comprised of music and dance from every nation and disseminate it freely via the proposed Video Common Market to the world, its effects on education and entertainment would be phenomenal. Peace can be as exciting as a John Wayne war movie. The tired slogan of ‘world peace’ will again become fresh and marketable.108

While the likes of MTV might not have produced utopia, jazz remains an important model here, because it is not just about reception but about production and participation, as Paik recognized. Through the significance of improvisation the ‘product’ is variable, as were Paik’s works that placed a premium on visitor/viewer participation. In ‘Global Groove’, and other video artworks, Paik also riffs, distorts and

248

Improvision

plays with found images, an approach not unlike the jazz performer’s approach to ‘standards’. Identity needs to be maintained to a degree, in order to recognize the variation, but this can, in many cases, be very minimal. As John Hanhardt has said of Paik’s technique, Rather than relying on standardized computer graphics and editing programs for processing his recorded imagery, [Paik] makes any visual source his own. In their quick edits, shifting points of view, and wild mixtures of imagery and sources his videotapes convey a sense of process and improvisation. Just as Paik sought in his performance and music pieces to engage both performer and audience in disruptive and surprising ways, so too does he utilize videotape as an instrument for altering expectations.109

Paik explains later in Post Music, citing Buckminster Fuller, that there is a shift in attitude needed from ‘You OR me’ to ‘you AND me’, an ecology of continued relevance, and one always aspirant in jazz improvisation. However naive this may seem, Paik and others were attempting to come to grips with a rapidly changing environment, in which the rise of TV, new technologies and shifting political, racial and sexual boundaries were under constant modulation. These shifts are still with us, and new and expanded participatory media, fuelled by the web, offer expanded opportunities to continue this debate; the ideological underpinnings are not so far removed from these early experiments as might sometimes be thought. Indeterminism and variability are central to Paik’s project. He writes that they are a ‘very UNDERDEVELOPED parameter in the optical art, although this has been the central problem in music for the last 10 years (just as the parameter SEX is very underdeveloped in music, as opposed to literature and optical art)’.110 I have written elsewhere about the second challenge here – an aspiration to an aesthetics of eroticism that Paik shares with Duchamp, but in terms of his observation about music, this depends on which music is referenced. While the avant-garde, under the leadership of John Cage, had certainly been exploring indeterminacy for some time, variability had been a cornerstone of jazz for more that sixty years, and part of African and Asian art for much, much longer than that. Global Groove took the form of a video collage of diverse elements, films of artists (including Cage and Allen Ginsberg, a key figure in the Beat Generation for whom jazz, and especially bebop, was a model),111 pop music, commercials and other broadcast fragments, all subject to Paik’s manipulation and insertion of richly coloured abstract electronic patterns. These abstract patterns do not have the same ambitions as Kandinsky’s, but they do carry with them the resonances of ‘visual music’ that followed the Russian artist’s paintings. The mix and pulse of editing also have the effect of a type of visual music themselves, and the idea of Groove attaches the whole project to various meanings as defined in the Oxford English Dictonary; especially as a noun: 2.c ‘the spiral cut in a gramophone record’ (first used 1902), hence to reproductive technology; and 4.b relating to groovy, ‘a style of playing jazz or similar music, esp. one that is “swinging” or “good” ’. As the verb:

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

249

5. intransitive. To play jazz or similar music with ‘swing’; to be ‘in the groove’ (see noun 4b); to dance or listen to such music with great pleasure . . . to get on well with someone; to make love. Also transitive, to play (music) swingingly; to give pleasure to (a person). slang (originally U.S.).

It thus brings together Paik’s earlier complaint that music lacks an aesthetics of sex in a way that visual art does not. The information super-highway is more of an information groove for Paik, but it also needs an active participant, someone who understands the groove, who ‘makes good progress or cooperates’.112 As Duchamp put it above, ‘the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act’. It shifts to an emphasis on the moral and aesthetic responsibility of the viewer; passive reception is not an option, you have to participate. This musicality is fundamental to Paik’s whole aesthetic. If we still ask, ‘Why is it music?’ Paik provided the answer in the closing lines of the New Ontology of Music: ‘Because it is not “not music”’. As he also wrote: Art History and musicology suffered too long from the separation of the unseparable.113 His aesthetic sought to get them running in the same spiral groove. But let us return to early abstraction and its desire to ‘paint toward the condition of music’, and move in contrary motion to Paik, away from the body.

Part 2b: Gesture and rhythm Delaunay’s Orphic abstractions had at least as significant an impact on artists in New York and in Paris as Kandinsky’s Improvisation, based on the trope of a more direct relationship between gesture and expression. American artists like Patrick Henry Bruce and Arthur Burdett Frost embraced his influence: ‘We are all interested in Delaunay. He seems to be the strong man who has grown out of Cubism’, Frost wrote.114 However, their fellow countrymen Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright (whose brother Willard was discussed in Chapter 4),115 refused to admit any influence in their formation of Synchromism, despite living in Paris at the time. It was their interest in colour per se (via the theories of Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart (1873–1954), rather than light, that marked the major distinction between the Americans and the Frenchman. Nevertheless, their desire to ‘paint towards the condition of music’ betrayed an intimate familiarity with Orphism, and especially the work of Kupka. MacdonaldWright wrote that he wanted to develop his ‘art to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to music’.116 More significantly, they espoused the importance of coloured rhythms, which are rather vaguely described by Willard Huntington Wright in the following terms, ‘By his colour rhythms he strove to incorporate into his painting the quality of duration: that is, he sought to have his picture develop in time like music.’ In discussing Macdonald-Wright, Willard writes, ‘while it is true that every realisation of aesthetic movement or the rhythm of form is based on the movement of the human body, it is not true that the human body is a necessary foundation for form alone’.117 This was an attempt to abstract rhythm into

250

Improvision

gesture, to separate expression from figuration, to go beyond specific reference to objects in the world. In this way their approach is antithetical to that of Duchamp and Paik, and was born of a desire to understand rhythm as abstracted form (as it might appear in music), because rhythm and form reside in ‘the direction and counterpoise of volume . . . the body is only his [Macdonald-Wright’s] inspiration to abstraction’. Both painters have a ‘knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organization . . . well in advance of that of any other painters of today’.118 While rhythm may have been sought in the organization of abstract forms, it also resided in the making of marks themselves.

Towards abstract expressionism The legacy of Orphic painting was also transmitted to America via another Europeanborn painter, one for whom mark-making became an end in itself: Hans Hofmann. Hofmann studied in Paris between 1903 and 1914, during which time he was particularly close to Robert Delaunay. Hofmann’s career describes an arc that maps transatlantic engagement in modern painting, providing a bridge between European and American modernism and nineteenth- and twentieth-century arts practices; not only as a painter, but also as a theorist and pedagogue. With his move to America in 1932, his work developed to utilize improvisation and painterly gesture within deliberately small-scale paintings. His role as an art educator and theoretician directly influenced a younger generation of artist and thinkers, from Lee Krasner to Clement Greenberg. He wrote of his own work that ‘I am still a naturalist. My work symbolizes spatial constellations, the rhythm of which has to me a deep psychological – a deep mystic and poetic meaning.’119 To realize this he developed a vocabulary of gestures and actions, all factored through a direct experience of paint and canvas, the canvas becoming for Hofmann (and later Abstract Expressionists) an interlocutor; a surface on which physical/bodily interaction with paint was inscribed. As Brian O’Doherty memorably put it in 1963, ‘The moment it leaves [Hofmann’s] hand the paint is alive and kicking.’120 Elsewhere Hofmann himself wrote, emphasizing, as we saw in Chinese theory, the role of rhythm: ‘The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of the work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity’.121 But the materials did not determine the message. ‘The medium becomes the work of art only when the artist is intuitive and at the same time masters its essential nature and the principles which govern it.’122 It would be hard to find a better definition of improvisation in jazz than Hofmann’s words. This tension between spontaneity and structure is intrinsic to jazz as an improvisatory art, as the saxophonist Steve Lacy has put it, improvisation exists ‘on the edge – in between the known and the unknown and you have to keep pushing it towards the unknown otherwise it and you die’.123 Hofmann had a great respect for the ‘laws arising from the particular nature of the medium’, and passed this on to his students. One of his most significant pupils was Lee Krasner, who studied with him between 1937 and 1940 and remained a great supporter

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

251

of his work throughout her life. A not uncommon criticism he faced in relation to his abstract paintings was their scale. Most were modestly sized easel paintings, and to the growing aesthetic context of Abstract Expressionism, this raised fundamental expressive limitations. Mark Rothko, for example, exclaimed that, ‘To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside of your experience.’124 Krasner herself saw it as a difference in perception and participation: ‘You see, Hofmann separates himself from nature, he puts nature out there, and he is the observer.’125 This again invokes the role of the observer, who is perhaps more easily engulfed by large scale paintings than small ones (a fact more phenomenological than imaginative). This is not to say that scale was an easy issue for Krasner herself to resolve. In 1945, after their marriage, Krasner and Pollock moved to the hamlet of Springs, near the town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York. Pollock had a converted barn as a studio, Krasner painted on the table or floor in the tiny second floor bedroom. These intimate, rich and dialogic paintings she referred to as her ‘Little Image’ paintings, and they return to the scale of Hofmann’s works, requiring imaginative focus rather than physical absorption. I shall say a few words about Pollock’s big band paintings before returning to Krasner and her combo works.126

Pollock Jackson Pollock’s interest in jazz is well known, Krasner herself described how he ‘would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records – not just for days – day and night, day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof! The house would shake. Jazz? He thought it was the only other creative thing happening in the country’ (the other being Abstract Expressionism). It is worth noting that despite structural affinities between his work and contemporary bebop, his tastes tended towards traditional rather than avant-garde jazz: Ellington, Basie, Waller, Teagarden, Calloway, Goodman, Holliday and Armstrong, were in his collection, rather than Parker, Gillespie, Roach and Monk. He owned more than 150 records. Like Dove’s they were mainly 78rpm disks that dated back to the 1930s and 1940s, but there were also a few newer LPs, 33.3rpm, which first emerged in the late 1940s. According to Krasner, he did not paint to music (as Dove had). Instead he would have marathon listening sessions, as she described, and then go out to the barn and paint.127 Nevertheless, there are clear structural parallels between what Pollock was doing in his mature drip paintings and jazz improvisation. More specifically, his getting in the groove, his immersion in the physical act of painting, his dependence on tacit engagement and phenomenological absorption, on being drawn in by the rhythm of movement. The days-long listening sessions helped him get ‘in the flow’. But his painting technique was, like a jazz musician’s, not just ‘unconscious’. For example, Pollock, like a musician, had to respond consciously to ‘mistakes’, things that were not expected; a type of post-hoc justification. I mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 2, the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock recalled an incident when he was playing with Miles Davis in the 1960s. Hancock, then a young but already highly acclaimed pianist, played a chord that sounded, as he thought, embarrassingly off the mark. To his surprise, Davis just paused for a second, before responding (on his trumpet) with, as he put it ‘some

252

Improvision

notes that made it right . . . with the choice of notes that he made, and the feeling that they had’.128 This is what Pollock did in relation to the variability of the drip technique. While he had some control, achieved through practise, chance inevitably intervened, painterly action happened in the moment and had to be responded to in the moment. Of course, sometimes, situations were not recoverable, but often new possibilities opened up in an unpremeditated way. Perhaps the closest structural jazz parallel to Pollock is pianist Keith Jarrett’s long, free-form, completely improvised concerts. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of preparation for the moment of ‘performance’. Much time is spent learning and mastering rhythmic and harmonic systems to exploit practical decision-making in real time. What Pollock was doing, like a good improvising jazz musician, was to find an operational balance between intention and spontaneity, between being ‘lost-in-the-flow/moment’ and being ‘mindful’ and creatively interventionist. It is a difficult balance to maintain, but one Ornette Coleman, when face to face with one of Pollock’s 1949 paintings, Green Silver, immediately recognized. Pollock was ‘in the same state I was in – doing what I was doing’. He went on: “See? There’s the top of the painting, there’s the bottom. But as far as the activity going on all over, it’s equal.” He pauses and shakes his head, impressed. “It’s not random. He knows what he’s doing. He knows when he’s finished. But still, it’s freeform.” Sort of like your music? “Well, like music, not just my music.” But most musicians put the melody up front, the chords in the background. “But that’s only because somebody told them that’s how it should be.”129

What Coleman recognized were the textual and spatial similarities between free jazz and Pollock’s form of Abstract Expressionism, especially the compression of pictorial space and the emphasis on flatness that Greenberg so famously championed.130 Coleman and Brötzmann often extinguish the difference between harmonic and melodic space, compressing the one into the other. Coleman himself encapsulated this in his concept of ‘harmolodics’, an equivalence between musical elements, ‘harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas’.131 This is a an attempt to free music from diatonic gravity, and to pull together the status of rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, etc. to allow them all the possibility of equal contribution within the context of improvisation. In Pollock too, line, form, colour, texture and composition are equal. As well as ‘the activity going on all over’, colour is not subservient to line; the line is the colour and vice versa, similarly with texture to form, and line and colour to form, and part to whole, etc. Coleman saw the improvisatory qualities of Pollock’s paintings clearly, ‘These don’t look like strokes. They look like signals or messages, like a letter he’s writing in the form of art, like some advanced Braille. It’s not something that you’ve seen before that you

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

253

can name. It’s something he created as he did it. The act of creation is the creation.’132 As Edgar Landgraf has succinctly put it, ‘Improvisations draw, condense, confirm, cancel, and compensate for distinctions they themselves produce and reproduce, building complexity and relating structured and unstructured, prepared and unprepared, known and unknown elements to each other.’133 The album cover of Free Jazz (which was recorded 21 December 1960 in New York) featured a reproduction of Pollock’s White Light (1954), which makes these analogies evident. What is interesting about the choice is that White Light is not one of the more well know drip paintings, it is a painting of much greater density and impasto, the only painting Pollock completed in 1954, in fact; one of his very last paintings. The original 1961 LP cover (the year of its release), designed by Loring Eutemy, reproduces what looks like a relatively small detail of the painting towards the bottom right of the cover, which is otherwise dominated by title and artist text.134 However, this ‘detail’ is in fact a cut-through. As the gatefold cover is opened the detail gives way to a full reproduction of the image on the right, which is faced by text that continues on the back written by Martin Williams, explaining the ambitions and details of the recording. The relationship between the music and ‘contemporary non-objective painting’ is mentioned by Williams, as is the relationship to other musical genres, but the relationship is more specific than this term suggests. With Pollock and Krasner the relationship of free jazz and painting is technical, involving real-time composition, flow and figure–ground relations, as explained above. The painting chosen to accompany Coleman’s Free Jazz album is formally much more like one of Krasner’s ‘Little Images’ than it is like his other ‘drip paintings’. Williams’ link with ‘non-objective painting’ is too general to claim any adhesion; such painting may be claimed to have a relationship to almost any type of music, qua music. Pollock uses brush, sticks, even a basting syringe as well as paint squeezed directly out of the tube. White Light is much more like Krasner’s earlier Night Light of 1949 (Figure 5.7), in that they both share an all over gestural, rhythmic thrust and a dense, impacted and claustrophobic surface, and they are both more or less the same size, c. 102 × 69 cm and c. 122 × 97 cm, big for Krasner and small for Pollock. Pollock’s title is set in direct opposition to Krasner’s.

Lee Krasner Her other ‘Little Images’ eschew this loose drip and drag of ‘Night Light’ and pursue a more calligraphic approach. One of the more recent Abstract Expressionist exhibitions of note moved away from the ‘big names’ (Rothko, Pollock, Newman, etc.) and developed an interesting series of duets, orchestrated between these paintings by Krasner and those of another, often overlooked Abstract Expressionist, the AfricanAmerican Norman Lewis. From the Margins: Lee Krasner/Norman Lewis 1945–1952 was curated by Norman Kleeblatt and Stephen Brown in The Jewish Museum of New York between September 2014 and February 2015.135 Within this exhibition I shall focus on one particular duet: that between Krasner’s Untitled c. 1948 (Figure 5.8) and Lewis’s Magenta Haze c. 1947

254

Improvision

Figure 5.7 Lee Krasner, Night Light, 1949, oil on linen, 101.6 × 63.5 cm (40 × 27 in.), Private Collection, Dallas, Texas. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc.

(Figure 5.9). Again, both canvases were painted around the same time and are rather modestly sized for abstract expressionist works: 24 × 30in. and 24 × 36 in. respectively. Indeed, the exhibition emphasized this modest scale, saying that it offered ‘a chance for visitors to see abstract expressionist paintings that are intimate and personal, presented in our elegant second-floor galleries, which still retain the proportions and decorative details of a private home’.136 Works that are suited to a domestic interior, rather than grand public space, they invite a different type of viewer engagement, as noted in the discussion of Hofmann and acknowledged by Krasner. They do not dominate the viewer’s field, but they invite us to move toward them. In this way they are emphatically more combo works than big band paintings.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

255

Figure 5.8 Lee Krasner, Untitled, c. 1948, oil on canvas, 61 × 76.3 cm (24 × 30 in.), Private Collection. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Image © Howard Agriesti, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Figure 5.9 Norman Lewis, Magenta Haze, 1947, oil on canvas, 24 × 36 in. © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

256

Improvision

Untitled pushes forward from the surface, breaking away from a grid, with alternating red and cream accents that produce an ideal syncopated rhythm, read either left to right or right to left.137 The scale produces a different type of engagement, the proximity enabling detail to be absorbed and the eye to wander. Apart from Hofmann, both Krasner and Lewis shared this domestic-scale abstraction with another important European painter who found his way to America: Piet Mondrian. Krasner knew Mondrian during his New York period and is reported to have accompanied him to jazz clubs and been a regular dance partner. They met through a mutual friend, Harry Holtzman, who was a founding member of the group of American Abstract Artists (AAA), with whom Krasner had exhibited. She met Mondrian for the first time at an AAA reception. Like Krasner, Holtzman was also a former student of Hofmann, and of George Grosz, both of whom he had strongly supported in coming to America through the AAA. Holtzman developed a close friendship with Mondrian (although forty years his senior), and helped him with his emigration to America when he left London, finding him a studio near his own in New York. Most significantly, Holtzman claims to have introduced Mondrian to boogie-woogie and New York jazz. Holtzman recalled that Mondrian was ‘long an admirer of real jazz, but had never heard Boogie-Woogie, which was fairly new. I had a fine High-Fi set and discs that had just appeared. He sat in complete absorption to the music, saying “Enormous, enormous . . .”. After several months . . . we got him a player and a collection of his favourite discs – all Boogie-Woogie, and the real Blues.’138 Their mutual interest in jazz continued throughout the next three-and-a-half years and in the early 1940s Holtzman took Mondrian to Minton’s Playhouse, introducing him to the music of Thelonious Monk.139 About the Dutch artist, Krasner wrote, ‘Mondrian I saw on many occasions. We were both mad for jazz, and we used to go to jazz spots together.’140 In an exhibition by the AAA Krasner recalled Mondrian’s comments and advice in regard to her own post-cubist work which were part of the exhibit: ‘You have a very strong inner rhythm. Never lose it.’141 Later in life, she said: ‘I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything . . . I don’t know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regard for the inner voice.’142 Soon after Mondrian’s arrival in New York he gave a lecture, sponsored by the AAA, after which there was a party to welcome him to America at the Café Society Uptown. Krasner described this venue. At that time it was, she claims, ‘the in place in New York and featured the latest music from, boogie-woogie, with Louis Armstrong at the piano and Hazel Scott, the exciting young singer [and pianist]143 . . . Mondrian was delighted, and we danced through the night.’144 In fact, Café Society Uptown was the second branch of a downtown nightclub established in October 1940 and was an integrated club in racial terms.145 It had been founded in Manhattan and was well known for attracting connoisseurs of jazz. In fact, it was the mutual love of jazz and dancing, as much as art, that drove Krasner and Mondrian’s friendship. She considered Mondrian one of her best dance partners. ‘I was a fairly good dancer, that is to say I can follow easily, but the complexity of Mondrian’s rhythm was not simple in any sense . . . I nearly went mad trying to follow this man’s rhythm.’146

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

257

Mondrian’s control on canvas was matched by his control on the dance floor. A fellow member of the AAA, Charmion von Wiegand, described Mondrian as ‘a perfect dancer [who] danced in a way so perfect that it was almost too perfect . . . it was alive’. This aspiration to ‘perfection’ was an element of the neo-plastic aesthetic, but one that was also off-set by an interest in asymmetrical balance, what we might call the swing of his canvas. His painting is not as pure and objectively controlled as is too often assumed. As Briony Fer points out, the frame and edges of his paintings are where arbitrariness enters his work, and where ‘bodily orientation is highlighted’.147 This is especially true of the lozenge works, like his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, but I would suggest it is true of all his mature canvases. Bodily orientation is key to the ‘feel’ of rhythm in his works and stands in counterpoint to the power of asymmetry. He was always alive to the phenomenological feel of his paintings, he never just applied pregiven rules.148 In this regard it is interesting to note that Mondrian was not particularly drawn to the improvised melodic context of jazz, but rather to the rhythm and syncopations of the rhythm section. Boogie-Woogie was considered the least melodic form of jazz and the most technical. According to von Wiegand, Mondrian liked to dance to the accompaniment of boogie-woogie, not the melody.149 At the Café Society Downtown, they went to hear Albert Ammons, Mead Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson. With boogie-woogie’s insistence on common time (it is often called ‘eight to the bar’) and simple harmony (I-IV-V-I), with walking broken-octave bass (so called stride bass), it is focused on chord-driven rhythm, which plays with temporal tension against a recognizable beat. Mondrian put it himself rather succinctly: ‘BoogieWoogie was to jazz what Neoplasticism was to Cubism.’150 Abstraction allowed a greater expressive emphasis on rhythmic gesture, but in Mondrian’s work there is instead a greater emphasis on rhythm in composition. He was extremely sensitive to the modulation of visual rhythm and its subtle shifts (as is evident in many of his mature canvases, where small changes are made to the position of horizonal or vertical elements, ghosts of which can be seen below the white paint). This sensitivity to rhythmic nuance is also evident within the linear elements of his two last great canvases, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–3) and the unfinished Victory Boogie-Woogie (1943–4). Here the rhythm pulls and pushes against the beat, evident in the horizontal and vertical grid, and the primary colours of red, yellow and blue punch asymmetrical and syncopated rhythmic accents through the overall pulse. These elements were earlier played out in a different manner in Krasner’s own Mosaic Collage (c. 1942).151 Here there is some rapprochement between gestural and structural rhythm. Mosaic Collage allows the relationship between gesture and subtle, syncopated rhythm to be manifest in the use of small squares of coloured paper set against blue and red smeared paint (see Figure 5.10). Like Krasner’s painting Untitled (1948–9)152 the strict grid of Mondrian is broken, although here it is also less regularly structured. The rhythm moves within the gesture and in the composition. Untitled (1948–9), on the other hand, operates within a clearer framework but with considerable tempo rubato, pulling against the grid and shuffling the rhythm, as boogie-woogie does within its strict harmonic and temporal flow. The same impulse can be seen in all of Mondrian’s New York canvases, a clear process of improvised mark-making and real time composition. Charmion von

258

Improvision

Figure 5.10 Lee Krasner, Mosaic Collage, c. 1942, 61 × 76.3 cm (24 × 30 in.). Private collection. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Photograph by Stefan Gesek, courtesy of the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Wiegand recalls a visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was working on his last painting: I remember (I recorded it in my notes) that it was on June 13, 1942, that I first saw Mondrian actually working on the Victory Boogie Woogie. A big diamond shaped canvas stood against the south wall, but it had not yet been painted white. We began to discuss it. ‘I want to balance things too much,’ he said, pointing to earlier canvases around his studio. Then he began moving tapes on the new diamond one. It was close and sticky in the studio and at first I was confused by his approach. After an hour, I got into it, and was able to follow what he was doing and suggested he move the picture into the alcove where we could observe the painting from a greater distance. Back and forth he trudged, laying down the colored lines and

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

259

sticking little tapes at the intersections, changing the lines so they went over or under. The left corner ended with a yellow bar. That came off. The two red crosses next to it were changed to yellow, to blue, back to red. The horizontals were run over the next long yellow line. The right corner gave the most trouble: a blue cross with enclosing red horizontals. He found a solution in cutting off the blue lines top and bottom and leaving empty space above and below the cross. It was difficult and subtle, in the way the lines interwove and the differences created by crossing an intersection on the horizontal or on the vertical axis. Each small dab of tape changing a color at the intersection changed all the relationships. Mondrian wanted it to be free, asymmetrical, and equilibrated, but without classic balance. ‘How I make you work,’ he would say. I made suggestions freely and he tried all of them. ‘No, I don’t like that, it’s less victorious,’ he said, when the long red vertical balancing the yellow central axis was changed.153

There is no doubt that Mondrian’s last two Boogie-Woogie paintings represent a set of new departures in his work that were never fully resolved. What is interesting is how Krasner, while highly respectful of Mondrian’s style, felt her aesthetic lay in another direction. While for Mondrian, improvisation is evident in the composition process, in real-time compositional shifts and nuances, it is much less evident in the final work and never in the quality of mark-making. The role of gesture and the marks of the hand allowed Krasner to show improvisation in the final work. Her close friend George Mercer, in replying to one of her letters, makes this explicit: ‘Piet is wrong. He’s cloistered. “Good” and “Bad”, pure and impure are equally valid . . . His purity makes for impure in painting – or doesn’t it? (One can still like him).’154 For Krasner, this opposition between good and bad, vertical and horizontal, black and white etc., is not enough of the world. It is too ideal, and is not sustainable in art. Instead she sought a dialectic, a play between these opposites (which is what Mondrian achieved, despite his rhetoric). Her love of jazz predates her meeting Pollock. In fact, it was something that drew them together. Her ‘Little Image’ works, encouraged by Pollock, became more spontaneous, more improvised in the moment than previous works, but as befits their nomenclature, they are more domestic in scale. As she said herself of these combo works: ‘You can have giant physical size with no statement on it. So that it is an absurd blow-up of nothingness, and vice-versa, you can have a tiny painting which is monumental in scale.’155 A painting like Nightlife (1947), for example, was worked on in the same idiosyncratic way, not at an easel, but as Mondrian painted, on the table and flat, like Pollock, but more dependent on gestures of the wrist than the sweeping movements of the arm or whole body. Nevertheless, the variety of marks is astounding: palette knife, blobs direct from the tube, thinned oil paint drizzled from the brush, dabs and dashes, all designed to direct immediate mark-making, to deliver gesture as fluidly as possible. There is little doubt that jazz acted as a model, but also as a mechanism to help her to get involved in the act of painting, rather than stand back and observe, as Mondrian did, or as she had done in earlier paintings where ‘nature’, however externally defined, was observed and

260

Improvision

‘translated’, as she had said of Hofmann. Now, for these paintings, she needed to get into the groove, into the swing of fluid mark-making, and the days and nights of continuous jazz record marathons, that she reports as having happened in their house, could not have but helped this process of absorption for both of them. This type of overall composition can only happen, as we discussed in relation to Pollock, when an operational balance between intention and spontaneity is found, between being ‘lostin-the-flow/moment’ and being ‘mindful’ and creatively interventionist.156

Norman Lewis Like Krasner, Lewis had first worked in a figurative style, influenced by social realism and inflected by post-cubist, surrealist artistic language. They were also both employed by the Federal Art Project funded by Works Progress Administration (WPA), and this provided them with training and a network of relationships and contacts. Lewis was also a teacher and founding member of the Harlem Community Arts Center, but by the early 1940s he, like Krasner, had moved away from figuration towards abstraction and, like her, Lewis joined the AAA. Lewis’s move towards abstraction had similar roots to those of the Parisian artists discussed earlier. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition entitled African Negro Art. Lewis attended and spent much time copying African sculpture and masks, especially those of the Baulé and Dan cultures, through a series of carefully observed drawings (see Figure 5.11). These works explore the manipulations of human form through exaggeration, elongation, asymmetry and the manipulation of negative space. These elements of African art were stored up and later, together with post-cubist formal explorations (themselves influenced by African models), helped Lewis in his modulation from social realist images, like Johnny the Wanderer (1933) and The Dispossessed (Family) (1940), to a more loosely coloured and compositionally playful image such as Man with Yellow Hands (1944), and more abstract works like Couple Kissing (1945).157 Lewis felt the frustration of an African-American artist defined by his colour and consequently, in the eyes of many, limited in his subjects. Compelled to a social realism which defined his early experiences in Harlem, his mature artistic interests lay more in the direction of formal innovation. He felt that direct political action was more effective than ‘political’ painting. He said of his (and others’) social realist canvases: ‘This kind of painting did nothing to arrest these conditions, and to be effective one had to become involved physically – at least carrying a picket sign. This [physical involvement] said much more to the mass of people, who don’t see that much painting. I don’t think any kind of artistic protest stops situations.’158 The canvas was a site of alternative reality, as he wrote himself: ‘Painting, like music, has something inherent in itself which I had to discover and which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality, that which is inherent in painting, in those four sides.’159 It is possible to see his ambitions in abstraction as a species of rebellion akin to that of the Afrofuturists, like the jazz musician Sun Ra, in the second half of the twentieth century, who searched for a more spiritual relationship to the world, powerful but indirect.160 Despite this, his abstract works often held a figurative element below the

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

261

Figure 5.11 Norman Lewis, Baulé Mask, 1935, pastel on sandpaper, 18 × 12.5 in. Private collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

surface (as did some other Abstract Expressionists such as De Kooning for example). This can be seen in Twilight Sound (1947), Street Musicians, or Jazz Club (both 1945), and in the Jazz Musicians series of 1948 (Figure 5.12). In these paintings there is a move to all-over composition and a merging of linear, delicate, gestural marks that move, as do some of Krasner’s paintings, towards calligraphy, or écriture as John Graham described it when it first emerged in artists’ work around 1937. Graham wrote, ‘Gesture, like voice, reflects different emotions . . . The gesture of the artist is his line.’ In relation to écriture he specifically characterized it as ‘a personal technique = the result of training and improvisation in contradistinction to technique in general, which is an accumulation of professional methods’.161

262

Improvision

Figure 5.12 Norman Lewis, Jazz Musicians, 1948, oil on canvas, 49 3/4 × 40 in. © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Graham’s book was very influential on this generation of American artists, Krasner commenting, ‘He had already written his book, which I had read prior to having met him . . . the book affected us and . . . he had these fabulous oceanic and African pieces.’162 While not referencing jazz directly, Graham had an interest in improvisation and a profound respect for, and interest in, African art. As Krasner mentions, he felt that ‘the relative importance of works of art depends on 1) Final conception in terms of space and matter, the highest form of art. Example: Bach, Gogol, Picasso, Mayakovski, Negro sculpture, Pre-Columbian sculpture.’163 Graham argues for an aesthetic based on the application of rules (training), but with a creative play with them (improvisation), ideas that had an impact on Pollock and others in his circle, including Krasner. Graham saw an artist having to ‘unite at one and the same time three elements: thought, feeling and automatic écriture’ (by which, as mentioned above, he understood personal technique). He goes on:

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

263

When a person talks about different objects which interest him his voice and gestures in their rise and fall and in their velocity, impetuously register his reaction to various aspects of these objects. Drawing or painting or writing is an immediate and organic accumulation of these spontaneous gestures set to the operating plane.164

So for Graham there is a synergy between physical or phenomenological expression and painterly expression, and for those who listened to jazz (Lewis, Krasner and Pollock, for example), the idea of creation as the result of ‘training and improvisation’ through gesture would not have been at all surprising. In fact, as Pollock said, ‘he thought it [jazz] was the only other really creative thing happening in this country’. Both jazz and the emerging ‘language’ of gestural expressive abstraction shared this approach, and for Pollock this was what made them so creative. Max Roach, the jazz drummer and pioneer of bebop, explained this in terms of language rather than écriture: After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you’ve just played: you just said this on your instrument, and now that is a constant. What follows from that? And then the next phrase is a constant. What follows from that? And so on and so forth. And finally, let’s wrap it up so that everybody understands that that’s what you’re doing. It’s like language: you’re talking, you’re speaking, you’re responding to yourself. When I play, it’s like having a conversation with myself.165

Language is often invoked in discussion of jazz and improvisation probably because it is the most common improvisatory act in everyday life – every conversation is an improvised performance. This was in part why écriture as an aesthetic strategy emerged in abstract painting as Graham argues. Krasner once conceded in conversation that some of her paintings ‘suggest hieroglyphics of some sort. It was a preoccupation of mine from way back and every once in a while it comes into my work again . . . Every once in a while I fall back to what I call my mysterious writing. I have no idea what this is about but it runs through periods of my work.’166 Mark Tobey was perhaps the first artist in this circle to produce such calligraphic painting in the mid-1930s. He painted a trio of works while in England,167 ‘Broadway’, ‘Welcome Hero’ and ‘Broadway Norm’ (all c. 1935–6), which utilized what is referred to as ‘white writing’ (an overlay of white calligraphic symbols on an abstract field).168 But Lewis’s jazz paintings bring this all together in a unique and powerful way: improvisation, writing/calligraphy, gesture, abstraction and jazz. His work Jazz Band (1948) makes this ‘white writing’ explicit in relation to both a black subject (jazz) and a black ground (black masonite). The band emerge from the improvised scrape and scratch of the incision tool on this black-coated masonite (see Figure 5.13). This work is an improvised journey around the band in which elongated instruments and distorted musicians emerge and are submerged, so that instrument, figure and gesture are pulled together and rhythmically compressed in a shallow pictorial space.

264

Improvision

Figure 5.13 Norman Lewis, Jazz Band, 1948, incised on black coated masonite board, 20 × 23 7/8 in. Private collection. © The Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Iandor Fine Arts, New Jersey.

In the two Jazz Musicians oils of the same year, figuration is further suppressed, so now figure has disappeared, although instrumental fragments linger. In the work above (fig. 5.12), the quick, opposing green and red marks knit an expressive surface together, that bounces a syncopated equivalent to the recently emerged bebop exchanges of musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie: ‘perhaps the most controversial aspect of bebop jazz is its rhythmic organization’.169 This polyrhythmic complexity emerges in the interplay of melodic, scale-like exchange, and from the push of the cymbal lead drum. Listen, for example, to Roy Porter’s drumming in Parker’s Septet recording of ‘Ornithology’ (1946).170 Bebop had emerged out of the Swing era as a ‘change in black thinking’ and an attempt to reconstitute jazz, as Scott DeVeaux has put it, ‘or more precisely the specialized idiom of the improvising virtuoso – in such a way as to give black creators the greatest professional autonomy within the market place’.171 This more intellectual music (above mere entertainment) is often taken as jazz’s move to the ‘condition of art’. That Lewis was engaged in a parallel practice of ‘abstractionist aesthetics’, moving painting to the condition of music that has technical points of contact with bebop, is not surprising.172 These jazz paintings, together with Cantata, Dancers, Reflections and Magenta Haze, were exhibited in a one-man show at Willard Gallery, 1–26 March 1948. The lastmentioned painting, Magenta Haze, is worth pause and comparison with a work from seven years later, Study in Blue (1954), a painting that moves past the atmosphere of bebop and its écriture of excited gestures (see Figures 5.14 and 5.15). It is interesting to note in passing that Lewis’s brother, Saul, became a very successful jazz violinist, playing with both Chick Webb and Count Basie. The violin, despite being more often associated

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

Figure 5.14 Norman Lewis, Magenta Haze, 1947, oil on canvas, 24 × 36 in. © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Figure 5.15 Norman Lewis, Study in Blue and White, 1954, oil on canvas, 40 × 50 in. Barnett Aden Collection, Robert Johnson Collection. Courtesy of Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington DC, from the exhibition Selections from the Barnett-Aden Collection: A Homecoming Celebration, 31 January–7 March 2009.

265

266

Improvision

with classical music, has a long jazz pedigree (as we noted in the discussion of Grappelli in Chapter 4). It is therefore emblematic of the musical space between Lewis’s musical interests, as exemplified in the jazz paintings, and his 1948 canvas Cantata. Magenta Haze is a modestly sized abstract painting that utilises a wandering and improvised line similar to Jazz Band, but this time with patches of colour embedded within the frenetic activity of the linear elements. The title comes from a Duke Ellington composition from the year before the painting, 1946. Ellington’s piece was written as a vehicle for the incomparable alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges. The title is one of a number of works by Ellington that explicitly refer to his interest in synaesthesia (not as a clinical experience, but as an artistic one). This was an interest of Ellington’s in colour and visual imagery which goes back to his arrested early ambition to be a visual artist, when he won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the study of commercial art. In a later interview, he admitted he did not think he could have carried forward a successful career in visual art, despite his interest and training in illustration, wood-carving and modelling. He said, however, ‘It was something you put away in your knowledge.’173 His synaesthetic inclination to think of music and musical atmosphere in terms of colour resurfaces in a number of his compositions, just to mention a few: Azure; Black, Brown and Beige; Black Butterfly; Blue Bubbles; Lady of the Lavender Mist; On a Turquoise Cloud; Blues in Blueprint; Sepia Panorama; Blue Light; Golden Feather; Yellow Dog Blues; Red Roses for a Blue Lady; Red Shoes; Colors in Rhythm; Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue; and, of course, Mood Indigo. He never took up his scholarship, and commercial art’s loss became music’s considerably greater gain. But a sensibility for timbre and orchestral colour was key to Ellington’s choice of musicians and orchestration: ‘You’ve got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best – certain entrances and exits and background stuff . . . My band is my instrument.’174 In Lewis’s painting, magenta’s complementary colour, green, is used to provide many of the structural accents, together with judicious use of lighter red. The overall hue of magenta is an analogue in Lewis’s painting to Hodge’s warm, full, alto timbre. The lines are analogous to the wandering and slurred decorated melody. This line suggests figures, just as Krasner’s graphic marks suggest écriture. There is a visual counterpoint and polyphony in the marks that evoke sound, which can also be found in Metropolitan Crowd (1946), Roller Coaster (1946) and Changing Moods (1947). This linear element is modulated with colour in the later ‘atmospheric’ painting175 Study in Blue and White (1954). Rather than colour (magenta) being used to provide a harmonic background against which a linear, melodic improvisation unfolds, the line and colour are here smeared together in a sfumato, forms that almost emerge out of ‘fog’. While one source of inspiration for the development of this formal device was indeed nature and the observation of sea fog,176 another is the musical form of the blues. The mood of melancholy here forms, not a background colour, against which individual gestural expression takes place, but is merged with the figural element. It cannot be unrelated to Lewis’s own experience of marginality within the group of artists around abstract expressionism, a racial marginality akin to Krasner’s experience as a woman artist in the group. Here it is resolved into a calm, dignified and slower tempo.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

267

As Jeffrey Stewart has perceptively pointed out, Lewis’s painting emerged around the same time that Miles Davis was moving jazz in a new direction.177 This was both a formal shift and an aesthetic one, a move that focuses questions on atmosphere, and Davis’s concomitant move to what has subsequently been called ‘cool’ jazz was created in an analogical way. The key figure here is the trumpet player mentioned above on Parker’s ‘Ornithology’, Miles Davis, and the key album is his Kind of Blue. The title is worth pause before we go further.178

Kind of blues The idea of the blues is central to the music, but it is a complex synaesthetic idea. By 1959 the blues was not simply a 12-bar form with flattened 3rds and 7ths, it was an ideology. Its relationship to questions of race is of obvious importance. Blues might be seen to have stood between the white-dominated rise of rock and roll and the R&B and soul music of a more trenchant black identity, at a time when jazz as a popular music was being eclipsed by rock and roll. That Davis chose to highlight this in a recording that sheds some of the more emotionally demonstrative African-American elements for a cooler, restrained, more impressionistic musical universe, and that this sound should be in part a consequence of employing a white jazz pianist, Bill Evans, raised more than just eyebrows in the jazz community.179 What Kind of Blue might be seen to point towards is, as Samuel Barrett has highlighted, an integrationist ideal. The depth of its influence on European jazz might in part be located in this bridge between different musical voices. In some ways, Kind of Blue represents a microcosm of the nature of jazz itself, a form led by African Americans, but profoundly influenced by European-Americans and a multitude of musical voices outside America. Kind of Blue is a kind of blues but not a straightforward one. Kind of Blue is based not on jazz standards, but new compositions by Davis and Bill Evans, who co-wrote ‘Blue in Green’ and probably contributed to ‘Flamenco Sketches’. Kind of Blue represented bebop’s tonal opposite, a series of minimal, fragmented, and understated pieces that emerge from a modal fog. The first piece on the album, ‘So What’, sets this new mood perfectly. ‘So What’ is easiest to consider as modal, rather than straightforwardly diatonic, and is structured around sixteen bars in the Dorian based on D, followed by eight bars based on Eƌ Dorian, and then eight bars that return to D Dorian. After an unmetred piano and bass duet that wanders to establish the Dorian mood, the bass (Paul Chambers) then sets up a type of ‘call-and-response’ familiar from blues and gospel music, but here the call is the bass and the response comes from the piano and then a trio of horns (Davis, trumpet; Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone), against a background swing marked on the ride cymbal of Jimmy Cobb until deliberately tripping via a cymbal crash and a switch from brushes to sticks into the main section, where a walking bass figure and interjected piano chords are set against Davis’s wonderfully laconic and concentrated muted trumpet solo. Davis played a Harmon mute with the central stem removed, so rather than using it for a ‘wah wah’ effect, he used it to change the timbre to a buzz that compresses the top notes and rattles the lower tones. It distances the sound and creates a melancholy voice, thin, removed and apart. This solo is followed

268

Improvision

by Coltrane’s harmonically searching and rhythmically more agitated solo, which in turn gives way to Adderley’s more bouncy melodic invention, to be concluded with Evans’s equally laconic chordal and dissonant piano solo utilising note clusters, consisting of many consecutive 2nds, for example, ̸ Bƌ, Dƌ, Eƌ, F, Gƌ, Aƌ, etc. This is a rhythmical expansion of the call and response material and develops until Chambers, returning to the original call to order, allows the piano and bass to regress back into the fog. This first track, recorded on 2 March, during which the first three tracks, side one of the LP, were laid down, was followed a month later by the last track, ‘Flamenco Sketches’, which was recorded on 22 April.180 This final piece is perhaps the most radical in conception; to quote Evans’s liner notes: ‘ “Flamenco Sketches” is a series of five scales, each to be played as long as the soloist wishes until he has completed the series.’ This makes it sound a little like a John Cage score, but the invention is less radical and maintains reference to the structure of the rhythmic swing and the musical flavour of the four soloists. The off-beat crotchet-to-minim chords that open it produce an undulating and gently flowing impression, not dissimilar from the circular effect of Satie’s Gymnopédies, and probably has its origins in Evans’ own ‘Peace Piece’ (1958), which itself brings out the ‘Satie’ in Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’, written for Bernstein’s score to On the Town (1944). There was an unusual degree of improvisation required for the session, as Evans explained: ‘Although it is not uncommon for a jazz musician to be expected to improvise on new material at a recording session, the character of these pieces represents a particular challenge.’ There was no rehearsal, although as Kahn points out it is likely some of the material was known to some of the players before the session.181 As Evans explained, the band was only given sketches of scales (modes) and melody lines on which to improvise. The five modes/scales in the case of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ are usually described as Ionian on C, Mixolydian on Aƌ, another Ionian, but this time on Bƌ, Phrygian on D and Dorian on G.182 Exactly what Davis gave as the sketch from which to work is not entirely clear; the photo of Adderley’s music stand (Figure 5.16) taken during the recording session has scale fragments (probably in Evans’s hand) which do not quite match the solo material.183 Whatever the harmonic directions, what Davis provided for the sextet was a series of musical ‘colours’, a palette to work with as the basis for the melodic improvisation and harmonic voicing. With such a high degree of opportunity for melodic improvisation, it is instructive to note one particular interruption to the recording. In the second take of ‘Flamenco Sketches’, Chambers, who syncopates his line, hits a wrong note. The tape records the exchange (MD/Miles Davis; PC/Paul Chambers; IT/ Irving Townsend, the producer): MD : Start over again PC : I’m sorry IT : Ready? MD : Yeah. IT : 3 . . . PC : I forgot – I thought I could close my eyes MD : Here you go Paul . . .184

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

269

Figure 5.16 Photo of Adderley’s music stand taken during recording of Kind of Blue, 22 April 1959. Photo: Fred Plaut. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University.

As mentioned earlier, improvising is often a visual as well as a sonoric process. While the character of each performer remains clear (which was the point for Davis of bringing these particular performers together), and the solos tend to four- or eight-bar patterns, rather than more asymmetrical phrases, the relatively high degree of freedom of expression and the consequent possibilities for melodic invention, and the harmonizing of these different musical personalities, represents an artistic synergy that was more than just musical. The kind of blues that Davis provided in this recording provoked a common language in which the mixed musical references that feed Kind of Blue could flourish. Evans, the white musician with the strongest European musical sensibilities, the harmonically progressive Coltrane, the funky Adderley, all buoyed up on the rhythmic fluidity of Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb and the synthesizing heart of the project Davis himself, who loved Bartok and Gospel, Debussy and African thumb pianos, ragas, folk music and flamenco modes (related to the Middle Eastern hijaz), this mix refocused the language of jazz. It would be hard to overstate the influence of the laid-back melancholy and modal language of this session on the future of jazz music, especially in Europe. By focusing on scales rather than harmonic forms, Davis produces a compression of musical space not unrelated to the blurring of foreground and background in Norman Lewis’s painting. Similarly, the focus on the materials of production, the actual building blocks, be they scales, chord voicings or lines and paint, are laid bare in both Kind of Blue and Lewis’s painting Study in Blue and White. Perhaps the closest link however, between Lewis’s painting and Davis’s music is in the analogue that Bill Evans himself made in the liner notes for the album. He wrote:

270

Improvision

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practise a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician . . . As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with sure reference to the primary conception.185

Taking up George Russel’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, Miles Davis had instigated a recording that was as sensitive to not playing as it was to making sound. The space and time around sounds and the melodic fragmentation made for an album of calm melancholy; the conception of unfolding improvisations through modes, rather than on the top of fixed chord sequences, and variations on and through a given melody, where the harmony was derived from the melodic content and vice versa, produced a unified statement that emerged from the rigours of group improvisation. As Evans put it, ‘Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.’ It is perhaps this social element that balances and offers solace to the quiet blues mood. The blues of isolation was felt and expressed too by Norman Lewis, but his involvement with other Abstract Expressionist artists in part mitigated this: ‘You need some kind of encouragement to work this way,’186 he reported, and especially supportive was fellow artist Ad Reinhardt. The attention to material in Abstract Expressionism naturally drew links to music, and Lewis developed this point as quoted above and extended here: Painting, like music, had something inherent in itself which I had to discover, which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality, that which is inherent in painting in those four sides . . . So that with this kind of awareness naturally you really get with yourself and you wonder what can I say, what do I have to say that can be of any value, what can I say that can arouse someone to look at and feel awed about. And this is where it gets very challenging and the question of being alone, this becomes – I don’t think many black cats know how to be alone because it requires this kind of concentration, and when you are alone what do you have to say? Do you have anything to say?187

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

271

Lewis’s Study in Blue and White is resonant of such isolation and Davis’s Kind of Blue is a solace to it, made by black cats (and one white one) who had something to say about this blue mood. To return to the trope invoked by Bill Evans in relation to Japanese brush painting, this type of mark-making becomes especially potent in Abstract Expressionism and relates, as Evans makes clear, directly to the expressive gesture of jazz improvisation. But by way of a conclusion and a coda to the book, I shall address its continuity through the example of a single contemporary artist, the French painter Fabienne Verdier. I do this to focus my concluding remarks, for I understand the ‘age of jazz’ (as opposed to the jazz age188) as continuing, in the significance of aesthetic improvisation, and many of the issues raised and discussed to this point continue to be appropriate to other types of gestural and rhythmic abstraction. Verdier’s work brings some of these issues up to date.

Part 3 CODA: Fabienne Verdier After studying art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and Chinese at the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, Fabienne Verdier received a scholarship to study at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China. For ten years she studied with Huang Yuan, a Sichuanese calligraphy master and landscape painter. This study of Taoist philosophy, aesthetics and practice provided her with the basis for technique, and a sensibility she transferred to a European context on her return to France. Here she developed a remarkable procedure for the production of large-scale, abstract, gestural paintings. Like Jackson Pollock before her, she aspired to amplify the expressivity of gesture from the marks of the hand and wrist in front of a canvas, to the dance of the arms and the whole body over the floored canvas. This magnification of écriture is related to Abstract Expressionism, specifically Krasner and Lewis, perhaps most closely to Franz Klein, as this ‘writing’ is not based in Western or Hebrew écriture but relates to Chinese calligraphy. By écriture I am extending Graham’s definition discussed above, focusing on his idea that ‘drawing or painting or writing is an immediate and organic accumulation of . . . spontaneous gestures set to the operating plane’. He focuses on abstract symbol rather than form. In the case of Pollock and Verdier the marks become the form, or at least the marks dictate the context in which form is resolved. This is not writing to convey explicit meaning, but writing to convey expressive meaning. Its guide is not therefore cognitive understanding, but rather intuitive, tacit understanding amplified from fingers and wrist to the whole body. Pollock used sticks, or hardened, worn-out brushes, basting syringes, in concert with thinned, synthetic, resin-based paints (usually gloss enamel), which were drizzled from above the surface of the canvas. There was rarely any direct physical contact in many of these mature canvases. As Krasner described it, ‘His control was amazing. Using a stick

272

Improvision

was difficult enough, but the basting syringe was like a giant fountain pen. With it he had to control the flow of the paint as well as his gesture.’189 Pollock described the process of reorientation. ‘On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting.’190 He also occasionally inserted a stick inside the tin of paint, so he could use it to allow the paint to run down it continuously onto the canvas, or he punctured the tin, making a hole in it to get an extended line of uniform density. He sought controlled improvisation through his experience of these diverse tools, which imbued a tacit knowledge of controlled spontaneity: ‘I have a general notion of what I’m about and what the result will be . . . With experience, it seems possible to control the flow of paint to a great extent . . . I deny the accident.’191 This last point is important. Like a jazz musician, he had a clear sense of direction, but was alive in the moment to the possibility of spontaneous creativity; practice, experience, expertise with the materials at hand, all are prerequisites for effective improvisation. As the jazz pianist Fred Hersch put it: it’s like you’ve got this third ear [or eye] that oversees the whole business – the craft part – and that’s what tells you what to do when you solo. If you’re going to repeat a phrase, repeat it in a different way, change it a little bit; make it say something; make it speak differently. Make the phrase I’m now playing shed light on the phrase I just played or the one I’m about to play. Do something to give the music contrast. Don’t keep beating a dead horse this way. Try something else. Be resourceful.192

Add to this the input of other improvising players, and a sense of the critical context for improvisation emerges. A similar method can be applied in Pollock’s case, except that, rather than the uncertainty of group improvisation, Pollock had the uncertainty of gesture, materials and tools, the external input came from what happened between these and the canvas. Verdier’s method is different, but related. She uses a brush, but a very a large one, made from between 25 to 35 entire horse tails. So large that it requires a specially designed gantry and a system of motorized ropes and pulleys to support it as it hangs from, and runs the length of, the roof of her double-height studio. Thus suspended, it is available to be steered and manipulated as a dance partner in the construction of her images. Like Pollock’s, the canvas is on the floor and, like him, she moves within the arena of the canvas, not just outside it. With the weight held from above, Verdier moves the brush in single, fluid movements, propelling it with her whole body. Each stroke requires preparation to manage its real-time unfurling. From Taoist philosophy she learned techniques of contemplation and meditation which she regards as integral parts of the process of a painting’s execution. In order to maintain a phenomenological focus, and importantly an absorbed balance between mindfulness (that is focused engagement in the present) and fluid expression as the action unfolds in time, meditative techniques are central. Here we pause, to consider the ideas of an art historian whose work is relevant to Pollock and read by Verdier, indeed one well known to John Graham, who may have discussed his ideas directly with Pollock and Krasner: the French art historian and writer Henri Focillon.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

273

In praise of hands Focillon’s Vie des forms was first published in Paris in 1934.193 Focillon’s debt to Bergson is evident in much of his writing, especially in their mutual antagonism to determinism, through a celebration of the uniqueness of lived time and the unique creative phenomenon of the artwork as a singular event, seen against homogenized mechanical clock time that parcels out duration in space as past, present and future.194 Art therefore exists as a supplement in relation to ‘structures of expectation’, the term Derrida uses to characterize the totality of technical, historical and ideological conditions that make something possible.195 Improvisation presents itself as a special case of this creation in durée, a resolution of invention in the face of determining forces, that in best cases brings newness into existence. The radical novelty of art which, while it emerges from specific historical conditions, cannot be simply reduced to them, is also impossible to predict prior to creation. This is proof for Bergson, Focillon, and later Derrida that, as Focillon puts it: ‘The most attentive study of the most homogenous milieu, of the most closely woven concatenation of circumstances, will not serve to give us the design of the towers of Laon.’196 And as Derrida later wrote: If we could do this in an exhaustive fashion, it would mean that nothing had happened. If there is a work, it is because, even when all the conditions that could become the object of analysis have been met, something still happens . . . If there is a work, it means that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say, make room, in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions.197

It is not even possible, Bergson argues, for the artist to know how a work of art will resolve from specific historical circumstances, because it is dialogic: Bergson uses the example of a portrait, which ‘will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art’.198 In the final section of Focillon’s ‘Forms in the Realm of Time’, this Bergsonian debt is clear. Here he challenges the idea of art as fixed to a series of chronological events, focusing on the importance of the ‘moment’, where history, race and environment meet. But historical time is not simply a ‘point along a line’ but rather is a ‘node’ or ‘protuberance’, as he puts it, a site where an artist might ‘slip back into the past or forward into the future’. ‘The artist inhabits a country in time that is by no means, necessarily, the history of his own time.’199 This is not to escape from history but to play with it, with past and contemporary circumstance, to develop complex dialogues with environment, economics, style, ideology, social and moral life; to work with or against – and here the ‘moment’ is key. A ‘work of art is, at the very instant of its birth, a phenomenon of rupture’. And this ‘moment’ is also an ‘event’,‘a structure, a defining of time’ – a denotation of unforeseen novelty. Art, for Focillon, does not exist neatly closed in a ‘period’ or a century, artworks exist in the flow and currents of duration; a physical and psychological as well as an historical dimension. The artist is an individual and active agent. The resultant work of art, in turn, affects this temporal flow, at the time of its

274

Improvision

creation, or later. Artists satisfy old needs and beget new ones, the artist invents a world of their own. In the revised edition of The Life of Forms, there is an additional essay at the end called ‘In Praise of Hands’. Here Focillon extends his discussion of forms in relation to space, matter, mind and time by addressing the specifics of embodiment, and writes of the role of chance and accident in the creative process. These are ideas that came from his own study of the art of Asia. His points chime well with our discussion of rhythm, and Picabia’s and Duchamp’s interests in the mechanical with which we started this chapter. He writes, ‘Here, we are at the antipode of automatism and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning ways of reason. In the action of a machine in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation’ [in contrast to the work of Hokusai, who] ‘belongs to a country where, far from concealing the cracks in a broken pot by deceptive restoration, artisans underline this elegant tracery with a network of gold . . . Thus does the artist gratefully receive what chance gives him and places it respectfully in evidence. It is the gift of God and the gift of chance latent in his own handiwork.’200 In this way the ‘handiwork’ – the work of the hand, be it a painting or a piece of music, has a voice and talks back. It needs to be listened to and responded to. It recalls Miles Davis’s adage that there are no ‘wrong notes’: ‘What he obviously meant was that you could take one particular thing that might sound incorrect or jarring and build something beautiful. He felt that that was a way of improvising.’201 Focillon continues with a story about Hokusai that has direct relevance to the painting methods of both Pollock and Verdier: It is said that one day, having unrolled his scroll of paper on the floor before the Shogun, he poured over it a pot of blue paint; then, dipping the claws of a rooster in a pot of red paint, he made the bird run across the scroll and leave its tracks on it. Everyone present recognized in them the waters of the stream called Tatsouta carrying along maple leaves reddened by autumn . . . Can any hand translate the regular and the irregular, the accidental and the logical in this procession of things almost without body, but not without form, on the surface of a mountain stream? Very much so: the hand of Hokusai.202

The ‘hand’ here is not literally the hand, but the initiation of a process: ‘The hands are present without showing themselves, and, though touching nothing, they order everything.’203 A little further on he discusses how, and this is a point that has resonance with Duchamp’s concept of the ‘found object’ as well as Pollock’s stick: ‘This reordering of a chaotic world achieves its most surprising effects in media apparently unsuited to art, in improvised implements, debris and rubbish whose deterioration and breakage offer curious possibilities. The broken pen that spits ink, the shredded stick, the rumpled paintbrush, are all struggling in troubled worlds.’ He then draws out how the idea that art is only produced by ‘inner vision’ misses the essential intercourse with material. ‘Such alchemy . . . constructs the vision itself, gives it body and enlarges its perspectives.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

275

The hand is not the mind’s docile slave. It searches and experiments for its master’s benefit; it has all sorts of adventures; it tries its chance.’204 As we have mentioned before, Klee’s journeying line is also open to such ‘interference’ on its walk. In conclusion to this remarkable book, Focillon writes the following: The creative gesture exercises a continuous influence over the inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch away from its merely receptive passivity and organizes it for experiment and action. It teaches man to conquer space, weight, density and quantity. Because it fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint everywhere upon it. It struggles with the very substance it metamorphoses and with the very form it transfigures. Trainer of man, the hand multiplies him in space and time.205

The hand, or the action of the artist, needs to be not just subject to the mind, but also to the material, environment, moment. This is dramatically played out in Verdier’s theatre of painting. Her paintings have ‘backgrounds’ or surfaces upon which the gesture of the brush sits, and to which it relates. Such a surface provides ‘matter’ on which a statement can be made, it manifests an idea in weight, density, light and colour. It provides, in short, a physical interlocutor. Such ‘grounds’ are painted in advance over many days. Creating the ‘environment’ is thus a matter of time, but the gesture in ‘answer’ to this site is an activity of a moment. ‘All day I am in a chaos of material, building up to the moment of intensity.’206 The sweep of the gigantic brush is painted in a vigorous but choreographed gesture with the whole body. This act of painterly unfurling is aided, returning to Duchamp’s Avoir l’apprenti le soleil, by what is missing from his Bicycle Wheel: by the addition of a pair of bicycle handlebars to the brush (see Figure 5.17). This allows Verdier to paint with two hands and offers some control over her large brushes that allows her to steer and adjust the line as she takes it for a walk. In effect she is unwinding the line, as Duchamp did for Octave as he struggled up to the sun on his unwound clef. In preparation, she may ‘map out’ the gesture in miniature with her hands, or to scale with a brush and water on the floor of the studio, a ghost dance of the final enactment of gesture before committing herself to the full choreography with loaded brush.207 As we saw previously, in relation to Chinese ideas of rhythm and calligraphic theory, the integrity of the gesture is fundamental, as ‘the spirit lives in the point of the brush’.208 After this act, the painting often continues, the line is clarified, wiped to sharpen an edge with a small brush, a finger or a cloth, in order to make more apparent the energy of the original gesture, but always to maintain the integrity of the initial sweep. The works are often finished with layers of glaze to pull and merge the background and the gesture together, as if to embalm them both in a thin coat of amber; to fix the moment of the event in, or rather, outside, time. If, however, in execution the choreographed gesture stumbles, the canvas is wiped down and cleaned completely, and after a pause, the whole process is repeated. Like Pollock, Verdier is open to chance but not at the expense of the ‘feel’ of the gesture. The integrity of the mark is what drives the line forward, and that needs to be maintained.

276

Improvision

Figure 5.17 Fabienne Verdier painting, still photograph from Fabienne Verdier: flux, Philippe Chancel’s film of Verdier’s work for Rome’s Palazzo Torlonia, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

277

278

Improvision

It can be helped (surprisingly) by serendipity, but it can also be tripped up by it. To follow this engrossed state requires an embodied phenomenology; an enactivism, an in-the-moment absorption. Recalling Bill Evans’s description of Kind of Blue in terms of art, in order to make the same point about the experience of improvisation while recording the album (as quoted above): [The artist] must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

Verdier too, in a simple but quiet way, has to get into the groove, as any jazz musician would. As we saw earlier in discussion of groove and jazz improvisation, the ‘understanding’, or getting into the swing of the gestural action, is not so much a matter of intellectual understanding, a cognitive comprehension of propositions or concepts, as it is understood by feeling it, an embodied knowledge: ‘Understanding a groove means to feel the qualitative relationships among the elements of the rhythm in one’s body.’209 More recently, Verdier has also added a funnel to her cache, not dissimilar from but much bigger than Pollock’s basting syringe. This allows for a fluid, uninterrupted, effusive line, which likewise flirts with the aleatoric, as in the large canvas Cadence of 2016 (see Figure 5.18). This technique allows what Focillon describes as a ‘concord between accident, study and dexterity [often] found in masters who kept their sense of daring and the art of discerning what is unusual in the most commonplace appearance’.210 The commonplace

Figure 5.18 Fabienne Verdier, Cadence, 2016, 72 × 160 cm, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. Waddington Custot. Photo: Inès Dielmann. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

279

here is the simple fact of paint on canvas, but its daring is evident in its polyphonic tension. The technique evolved following an accident in which Verdier damaged her shoulder, making the brush too heavy to manipulate. These ‘walking paintings’, as she calls them, are produced by literally taking a line for a walk. She walks in a single breath across the canvas, guiding the funnel in a rhythm physically in tune with the natural pulse of steps, releasing the paint in tempo with the unfolding cadence, inflecting and modulating the voice of the paint. She has said, ‘I’ve always experienced a painted line as a line of sound. I’ve always experienced a line of sound as a pictorial construction.’211 The polyphony of these lines, in sound and space, is in their concord with embodied understanding, a place where art and music easily meet. This polyphonic tension and cadence is also evident in a recent project (2016) where Verdier became the first visual artist-in-residence at Miles Davis’s old school, the Julliard in New York. I am indebted to the filmmaker Mark Kidel, who directed a documentary film The Juilliard Experiment: An Adventure with Music and Musicians (Calliope Media, 2016), which recorded the residency. Music has never been far from Verdier’s understanding of art as the above quotation witnesses,212 despite her frequent retreat into meditative silence. It would be a profound mistake to imagine music as silence’s opposite. Rather, silence is music’s constituent, we might even say that they relate through a form of différance.213 As a child Verdier contemplated the role of musician (her grandfather was a composer), and for some time she had piano lessons, but retreated from musical performance and eventually chose the more solitary life of a painter, although retaining an element of performance. At the Julliard School, Verdier had the opportunity to work with a range of musicians: the composer Philip Lasser, the singer Edith Wiens, the cellist Darrett Adkins and the conductor William Christie. All offered different types of interaction, with Adkins and Lasser providing the opportunity for mutual, rather than one-way inspiration. But in this context the most interesting interaction for me was her involvement with the jazz faculty, led by the veteran jazz pianist Kenny Barron; with Reuben Allen taking over on piano, Lukas Gabric on saxophone, Jordan Young on drums, Greg Duncan on guitar and Paolo Benedettini on bass.214 The session was set up so that clear and fluid mutual improvisation could take place, and it was this that set it apart from most other interactions during the residency. All of the jazz musicians were comfortable with such spontaneity and with the addition of an artist, who effectively turned the quintet into a sextet. What emerged from Verdier during these jazz sessions was drawing that matched the tempo of the music (see Figures 5.19 and 5.20). Drawing on glass (a hard, unusual surface that allowed filming in real time from below), her pen made tapping noises as she drew to keep up with the changing music around her. This percussive sound soon came to fit with the music and in a unique way the action of drawing really became an interacting sixth member of the band. Given her retreat into solitude and silence in her normal activity as a painter, it was with improvising jazz musicians that she claimed she was ‘able to experience the power of silence’ most effectively. In addition, the phenomenological dimension of jazz interaction, its physical and visual presence, was also recognized in the Juillard Experiment: ‘My encounter with these two great jazzmen

280

Improvision

Figures 5.19 (top) and 5.20 (bottom) Still photographs of Fabienne Verdier drawing from Mark Kidel’s film The Juilliard Experiment, 2016. Calliope Media. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

[Barron and Drummond] was a real shock. They teach through their presence: it is as though a tranquil force emanates from them, allowing what they think to be felt without recourse to words. My first emotional response was to feel, not only the group’s way of being, but also its ethic.’ What emerged from this encounter was, nevertheless, drawing that accommodated itself to the groove of the group improvisation, and which contributed musically through its percussive presence, during the course of which a meandering, but pulsing series of automatic écriture emerged. Of this she writes ‘Here, once again, my style was set free. I tried to give form to the musical exploration of interiority. Curiously, in the crazy dynamics of the drawn line, I

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

281

recovered some of the principles that the Chinese masters had taught me more than twenty-five years previously, primarily concerning the form of writing they refer to as “mad cursive.” But, for the first time, I untethered myself from the intellectual diktat of the ideogram.’ These drawings required new marks, new compositions, a form of free flowing, loose and abstract line-making. This automatic écriture drawing nevertheless does take on the characteristics of Chinese cursive script,215 especially what was called ‘wild cursive’ (⣲㥹), which when it was developed in the Tang dynasty (c. 680–907), was sometimes called Diān Zhāng Zuì Sù, after its two principle practitioners Zhang Xu and Huaisu (crazy Zhang and drunk Su, 事ᕥ䞹㍐). The style became more famed for its artistry than as a form of legible script, with its rhythmic flow and evolving relations, as one mark (character) morphs into the next, bringing expressive gesture and poetic reference together. What replaces the bold drama of the large single stroke was a compelling sequences of traces, running lines rather than walking paintings; figures that travelled up and down or left to right over the support, as a form if not of writing, then of notation. In moving away from the ideogram, Verdier is referencing another important abstract expressionist, Barnet Newman, who defined the ideogram in the introduction to a 1947 exhibition on ‘The Ideographic Picture’. He defined it as ‘representing ideas directly and not through the medium of their names; applies specifically to that mode of writing, by means of symbol, figures, or hieroglyphics’.216 This idea was not uncommon in the emergence of abstraction, as we have seen in Krasner, Lewis and Pollock, and the tendency has been well summed up by Daniel Belgrad in relation to post-war American culture. ‘In the “ideographic” sign, writers and painters saw a means of developing perceptions that their own culture had devalued. The ideogram suggested a cultural reorientation grounded in the reintegration of physical, emotional, and intellectual experience.’217 The idea of the ‘glyph’ or ideogram as a plastic meta-language, and as a means of retrieving something fundamental to experience, had particular relevance in post-war America, as Belgrad so effectively shows. Indeed, the ‘mark’ as a means of bypassing conscious thinking is central to most abstractionist projects, including The Julliard Experiment. As the drummer Jordan Young said about the improvisation with Verdier, ‘The hardest part is that you can’t think – things have to be so deeply ingrained in you that you can’t even think about it, it takes years.’218 This is exactly what Paul Berliner uncovers so fully in his Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994). It is necessary for the execution of any complex task of coordination that it is autonomic, rather than conscious; the development of motor skills is key to this, and improvisation is a special case of it. Verdier’s aim was precisely to ‘put [her]self in danger’, as she describes it, to move away from habit and her own solutions, because when music confronts painting it necessarily asks different questions, and this was recognized by both Gabric, who said ‘this experience let me play as free as I have in a very long time’, and Benedettini, who found that the session was ‘really helping me to loosen up and go to places where I can actually get to a deeper space’. The confrontation of different etiquettes means that the unexpected is always present, and in this context, it is an interaction between different configurations of material,

282

Improvision

wood, gut, string, hair, ink, paint, pen; fed by eye, ear, hand, brain and body. As Adkins puts it in the Juillard Experiment, in relation to performing alongside a painter who is in turn performing a painting, ‘I’m always surprised because you make mistakes, you think you can’t make a mistake – like a painter, sometimes you make actual mistakes, sometimes it’s just different but sometimes you know it’s not what you meant – that also happens with this.’ The unexpected can be like a mistake, and as Focillon puts it, ‘As accident defines its own shape in the chances of matter, and as the hand exploits this disaster, the mind in its own turn awakens . . . The hand is not the mind’s docile slave. It searches and experiments for its master’s benefit; it has all sorts of adventures; it tries its chance.’219 But the hand also needs an imagination in concert. This is what the encounter between abstract art and jazz sought in the early twentieth century. This is the condition of jazz music, the intercourse of material and idea, the physical and the provisional, and it is this concert and conversation that Verdier’s art continues to disclose in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

See L. Cavrell, ‘The universal mind of Bill Evans: the creative process and self-teaching (video) 1966’. Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ie3sglFcum4&spfreload=10. Accessed November 2019. W. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. P. Vergo and K. C. Lindsay (London: Faber Press, 1982), p. 357. Ibid, p. 370. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. M. Bullock (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 52–5. Ibid, p. 55. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 129. Ibid, pp. 159, 191, and the previous quotation. Ibid, p. 195. Ibid, p. 197. Ibid. See Wassily Kandinsky, Watercolors.Drawings.Writings. (with an essay by Jean Cassou) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), following p. 32. Ibid, p. 19. E. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 147. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 375. Ibid, p. 372. Ibid, pp. 372–3 Oil on canvas, 60 × 54 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art. See Roussel, Impressions of Africa, trans L. Foord and R. Heppenstall (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 284. The performance put on by the passengers of the shipwrecked Lynceus for the benefit of themselves and their captor the Emperor Talu VII, who was dressed ‘as a music-hall singer, in a blue dress with a low neckline, falling at the back into a long train, on which the number 472 was clearly printed’, include drum juggling, a boy of four who imitates sounds (trains, domestic animals, the plaintive notes of a cello, etc.) to ‘afford a

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

20

21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

283

complete illusion of reality’; Bex the chemist who had a glass case with a musical instrument inside powered by electric motors producing heat and cold on a metal of his own invention called bexium, that produced music through temperature; a worm who plays the zither directed by the Hungarian Skariofszky, the worm at one point ‘going beyond the bounds of the usual repertory allotted to the instrument, the reptile threw itself into the polyphonic execution of a particularly lovely waltz’; a ‘witty, lucid and evocative’ lecture given by Juillard the historian on the Electors of Brandenburg; and a presentation by the ichthyologist Martignon of a new fish the ‘sturgeon-skate’, etc. See Roussel, Impressions of Africa. However, Bakhtin’s ideas, while formed in the 1920s, had limited impact until the 1960s. See M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170. See A. Schwarz, ‘The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even’ in A. d’Harnoncourt and K. McShine, eds, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 88. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imgination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), pp. 279–82. See G. Brand, J. Sloboda, B. Saul and M. Hathaway, ‘The reciprocal relationship between jazz musicians and audiences in live performances: a pilot qualitative study’ in Psychology of Music, vol. 40, no. 5, 2012, pp. 634–51. A. d’Harnoncourt and K. McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp, p. 272. Marcel Duchamp, interview by Georges Charbonnier, radio interviews, RTF, 1961. See A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, revised and expanded, vol. 1, ‘The Text’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 27. Duchamp interviewed by Katherine Kuh in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 90. C. Mann, Paris: Artistic Life in the Twenties & Thirties (London: Laurence King, 1996), p. 18. G. Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes: esthétiques (Paris, 1913) reprinted and translated in M. Antliff and P. Leighten, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago University Press, 2008), pp. 480–82. Original poem, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Sanglot_de_la_Terre. Translation by Lindsey Shaw-Miller. The final lines of the poem are: ‘Tu seras en risée aux étoiles sans cœur, Astre jaune et grêlé, flamboyante écumoire!’ L. D. Steefel, Jr., in his article ‘Marcel Duchamp’s “Encore à cet Astre”: A New Look’ (Art Journal, Fall 1976), pp. 23–30, suggests there may in fact be four figures and goes on to give an interesting reading of the work. Nos. 163 and 177 in A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp; with catalogue raisonné (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969). See Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar The Visual in Music (Routledge, 2016). No. 171 in Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp; with catalogue raisonné. C. Tomkins, Duchamp: a Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 47. No. 77 in A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp; with catalogue raisonné. There is an earlier watercolour of Suzanne at the piano, c. 1906–7. Gough-Cooper and Caumont (Marcel Duchamp: A Life in Pictures, Atlas Press, 1977, p. 10) refer to Mme Duchamp’s increasing deafness during the years 1908–89, and Alice Goldfarb Marquis found confirmation in an interview with a family friend (1981, 70).

284

Improvision

39 Schwarz describes it as a ‘musical ready-made’ and he compares it to the 3 Standard Stoppages (1913) which he calls an ‘exploitation of chance in space, here chance is used in the dimension of time’, p. 437. 40 The first performance on piano of Musical Erratum was at a ‘Dada Demonstration’, on 27 March 1920 at the Théatre de la Maison de l’Oeuvre, Paris, by Marguerite Buffet, a professional pianist and sister of Gabrielle, Picabia’s wife. 41 C. Van Vechten, ‘Pastiches et Pistaches: Charles Demuth and Florine Stettheimer’, Reviewer, no. 2 (February 1922), pp 269–70. 42 Road races that are usually amateur and c. 120 km in total with a rolling enclosure course (open to traffic when not being used to race), involving a series of laps (of 5–10 km each). 43 The collection of papers that directly relate to the Large Glass, which are known as the Green Box, was not published until 1934; and his Box in a Valise, a miniature portable Duchamp museum, was constructed in 1941. 44 I should like to thank the anonymous reader of my manuscript who pointed out this link. 45 https://www-oed-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/oed2/00069637 46 A. C. Danto, ‘Oskar Kokoschka’ in Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 64. 47 https://www-oed-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/oed2/00113444 48 I was set off in this direction by John Koening of the University of Toronto, who, following a lecture I gave there, suggested to me this possible connection between Duchamp and Octave Lapize. I am very grateful for his prompting and insight. 49 John Carlin, ‘Summit or nothing’. London: Guardian (1 June 2003). Retrieved 20 July 2018. Ironically Lapize died from a descent: he was a fighter pilot in the French army during the war and was shot down on 14 July 1917, dying from his injuries in hospital. 50 Nude Descending a Staircase (no. 2), 1912, 147 × 89.2 cm, oil on canvas, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, Philadelphia Musuem of Art. 51 See E. H. Gombrich, The Use of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999), ch. 8 ‘Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles’, pp. 212–25. 52 Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, a selection translated by George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 49. 53 P. Klee, The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), p. 103. 54 A. Goldsworthy, Stone (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 82. 55 J. D. Herbert, Brushstrokes and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso (University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 2. 56 Klee, The Thinking Eye, p. 105. 57 Quoted after Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 193. 58 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 193 (n.). 59 See for example Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, trans M. Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray (Carlson, New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67. 60 K. Dick and A. Z. Kofman’s film Derrida (Jane Doe Films, 2002). Quotation 58:57 and on. 61 J. Derrida, ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 9–32, quotation p. 21.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

285

62 Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, ‘Le musicien, le philosophe et les fanatiques’, Jazz Magazine 473 (1997), pp. 26–8, quotation on p. 28 (translation D. Wills). 63 See P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago University Press, 1994). 64 We might think of this as like a conversation – the words existed before, the specific order and emergent ideas are composed in real time in the act of speaking. 65 Between live and recorded jazz? The invented and mechanical? 66 Derrida, ‘Psyche. Invention of the Other’ in Reading de Man Reading, ed. L. Waters and W. Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25–66, quotation p. 51. 67 Derrida, ‘The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman’ (trans. T.S. Murphy, Genre, 37.2 (2004) pp. 319–29. Quotation p. 322–23. 68 Derrida, ‘Psyche. Invention of the Other’, p. 28. 69 See D. Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem, or The Music of Memory’, Discourse, vol. 30, no.1/2, Special issue ‘ “Who?” or “What?” – Jacques Derrida’ (Spring 2008), pp. 157–76. 70 Translated by T. S. Murphy in Genre XXXVI (Summer 2004), pp. 331–40. Bold text = original English text. 71 Derrida and Coleman, Jazz Magazine, 473 (Sept. 1997), pp. 26–28. 72 See Les Inrockuptibles 115 (20 Aug.–2 Sept. 1997), pp. 36–43. 73 See C. Malabou, Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford University Press, 2004). 74 Quoted after D. Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem’ p. 167. ‘Prime Time’ were Coleman’s group formed in the 1970s to play jazz-fusion: Ornette Coleman, alto saxophone, trumpet, violin; Dave Bryant, keyboards; Chris Rosenberg, Ken Wessel, guitar; Bradley Jones, Al MacDowell, bass; Chris Walker, bass, keyboards; Denardo Coleman, drums; Badal Roy, tabla, percussion; Avenda Khadija, Moishe Nalm, vocals. 75 According to Wills he never foresaw the hostile reaction to his performance with Ornette Coleman, a cold reception yes (l’échec froid), but not a commotion (chahut). ‘Notes Towards a Requiem’, p. 169. 76 Quoted after Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 442. 77 Ibid, p. 442. 78 As children my friends and I used to use ice lolly sticks fitted in the wheels of our bikes to cause a clicking sound as we rode around. 79 L. D. Steefel, Jr., ‘The Position of La Mariée Mise à Nu par Ses Célibataires, Meme (1915–1923)’ in the ‘Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel Duchamp’ (PhD, Princeton University, 1960). 80 Quoted after Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, pp. 442–3. 81 K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (Harper Row, 1962), p. 89. 82 In the late 1960s Vertigo Records designed a label based on the work of Op Artist Marina Apollonio, see for example, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_18WNEEGZ1k&t=5s, and the exhibition ‘Vertigo. Op Art and a History of Deception 1520–1970’ which took place at the Museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien between May 2019 and October 2019. 83 M. Leiris, ‘Arts et Métiers de Marcel Duchamp’, Fontaine (Paris), no. 54 (Summer 1946), pp. 188–93. 84 Quoted after Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 442. 85 Text from the New York edition of 1,000 unnumbered, unsigned sets, see 294b in Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969), p. 499. 86 For more on this see chapter 2 of E. F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2005).

286 87

88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105

106

Improvision It was also the case that in 1963 Germany only had one TV station, and as Paik did not have access to video equipment, only to second-hand TV sets, his manipulation of the TV output could only take place during the limited hours of broadcasts in the evening. For a discussion of this in relation to Koeran festivals see Youngchul Lee, ‘The Secret of the Cow’s Head’ in EXPosition of mythology-ELectronic technology (South Korea, Nam June Paik Center, 2011). Cooked cow’s head is used in Korean cuisine in such dishes as Jokpyeon (족편). S. Kim and S. Park (eds), Nam June Paik Art Center Interviews (Wulf Herzogenrath, Yongin, South Korea, Nam June Paik Center, 2012). There are many examples on YouTube, for example, http://youtu.be/Q6u5nJCR0xY, and http://youtu.be/1opFd7k-fkQ, and http://youtu.be/hCyEHm9pZkk. For more on this see Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music (Yale, 2002) esp. chapter 3, ‘Instruments of Desire: Musical Morphology in Picasso’s Cubism’, pp. 89–120. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13258256 and https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13852872 See https://www.thestrad.com/lutherie/in-focus-the-carrodus-guarneri-delgesu/7958.article See D. J. Wakin, ‘Not Everyone’s in Tune Over Precious Violins’ in The New York Times Sunday Review, 28 January 2012, p. 4. An entertaining summit recording, featuring a number of these violinists, is a German recording from the concert ‘Jazz im Fauteuil’ in Basel, Switzerland, 30 September 1966, available on MPS 821 303–2 also available as Saba– SB 15 099 ST. To name a few; Stéphane Grappelli (1908–97), Didier Lockwood (1958–2018), Jean-Luc Ponty (b. 1942), Michel Warlop (1911–47), Dominique Pifarély (b. 1947), Régis Huby (b.1969) and the young Scott Tixier (b. 1986). A. Kagen, Paul Klee/Art & Music (Cornell University Press, 1983). Quoted after V. Walmer, As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977 (Serpent’s Tail, 2018, first published 1977), p. 171. S. Hancox, ‘Contemporary Walking Practices and the Situationist International: The Politics of Perambulating the Boundaries Between Art and Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, (no. 2), 2012, pp. 237–50, quotation p. 237. Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Internationale Situationniste 2 (1958), trans Ken Knabb, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm [accessed 3 August 2018]. J. Cage, ‘More on Paik’ in John Cage Writer, ed. R. Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight editions, 1996), p. 156. Ibid, pp. 153–8. Oxford English Dictionary, from the second edition (1989), see https://www-oedcom.bris.idm.oclc.org/oed2/00080600. See Youngchul Lee (et al.), EXPosition of mythology-ELectronic technology, Trickster Makes This World, Random Access (Nam June Paik Center, 2011). Nam June Paik, ‘New Ontology of Music’ in Postmusic, The Monthly Review of the University for Avant-Garde Hinduism, FLUXUS publication, 1963. Reprinted in J. G. Hanhardt, G. Zinman and E. Deker-Phillips, We Are Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2019). Quoted after M. Nyman, no attribution, in his essay ‘Nam June Paik. Composer’ in J. G. Hanhardt (ed.) Nam June Paik (Whitney Museum of American Art, Norton and Co. NY and London, 1982), p. 87.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

287

107 See, https://fluxusvisited.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/new-ontology-of-music/ (assessed 4 August 2018) and https://soundartarchive.net/articles/Paik-xxxxNEW%20ONTOLOGY%20OF%20MUSIC.pdf. 108 Nam June Paik: Video ’n’ Videology 1959–1973, ed. Judson Rosebush, published by the Verson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, unpaged, reprinted in Nam June Paik Global Groove 2004, ed. J. G. Hanhardt and C. Jones (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 2004). 109 Nam June Paik Global Groove 2004, ed. J. G. Hanhardt and C. Jones (Guggenheim Foundation, NY, 2004), p. 13. 110 Nam June Paik: Video ’n’ Videology 1959–1973, unpaged. 111 Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) makes many references to jazz. See https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl. It starts: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

112

113 114 115

116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124 125

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz . . . For all references to the OED see The Oxford English Dictonary (2nd edn) prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner), vol. VI (Follow–Haswed) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 867–8. And https://www-oed-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/. See ‘Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan’ in Institute of Contemporary Arts Bulletin, vol. 17, 1967, pp. 7–9 quote p. 8. Quoted after G. Levin, Synchromism and American Colour Abstraction, 1910–1925 (New York: George Braziller, 1972), p. 37. He discusses Synchromism as the culmination of modern art in Willard Huntington Wright, Modern Painting Its Tendency and Meaning (New York: John Lane; London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1915), pp. 277–304. In The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters (New York, Anderson Galleries, 1916), no page number. Wright, Modern Painting (1915), p. 300–1. Ibid, p. 302. Quoted from T. Dickey, ‘Spatial Constellations: Rhythms of Nature’ in H. Friedel and T. Dickey, Hans Hofmann (exh. cat. Lenbachhaus, Munich, New York: Hudson Hill Press, 1998), p. 88. B. O’Doherty, ‘Hans Hofmann: A Style of Old Age; Museum Holds Ten Year Retrospective of Veteran’s Work’, New York Times, 15 September 1963. H. Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948), ed. S. T. Weeks and B. H. Hayes, Jr (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 58. Ibid, p. 59. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, second edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 54. M. Rothko, ‘Statement’, Interiors, vol. 110, no. 10 (May, 1951), p.104. L. Krasner, in B. Diamonstein, Interviews conducted at the New School of Social Research, New York. In Inside New York’s Art World, pp. 199–210 (New York: Rizzoli), quotation p. 202.

288

Improvision

126 The word ‘combos’ to describe small scale jazz groups (c. 3 or 4 musicians) dates to 1935 according to the Oxford English Dictonary, as a noun of combination it goes back to 1929 (online access, November 2019). 127 Krasner explained this in a 1964 TV interview. For more on this see Helen A. Harrison’s very useful article ‘Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Inspiration or Imitation’, available from www.academia.edu/10164140/Jackson_Pollock_and_Jazz_ Inspiration_or_Imitation (accessed 9 August 2018). 128 D. Cheadle, Miles ahead [Video file]. Legacy Recordings https://www.facebook.com/ LegacyRecordings/videos/10154013041127996/ (2005). 129 F. Caplin, ‘Serendipitous Convergence Hooks Up Sax and Splatter’ (New York Times, 19 June 2006). 130 See for example Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’, Arts Yearbook 4, 1961. 131 O. Coleman, ‘Prime Time for Harmolodics’ in Down Beat, July 1983, pp. 54–5. 132 Caplin, ‘Serendipitous Convergence’. 133 E. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 147. 134 Loring P. Eutemey (1931–2013) also designed, among many other album covers at this time; Coleman’s ‘This is Our Music’ (1961); Coletrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ (1961); Tristano’s ‘The New Tristano’ (1960); The Modern Jazz Quartet’s ‘Lonely Woman’ (1961); Mingus’s ‘Oh Yeah’ (1962); and Jackson’s ‘The Ballad Artistry of Milt Jackson’ (1960). 135 N. Kleeblatt and S. Brown, with essays by L. Saltzman and M. L. Bagneris, From The Margins: Lee Krasner/Norman Lewis 1945–1952 (The Jewish Museum, New York, dist. Yale UP, New Haven and London). 136 Ibid, p. 9. 137 This multi-directional reading reminds us of both English and Hebrew. Krasner was a Jew and although she had studied Hebrew as a child, she claimed as an adult to be unable to read it (see https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/lee-krasneruntitled-1949/). 138 Quoted in R. P. Welsh and J. M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), vol. II–III, p. 173. See also G. Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), p. 150. 139 Minton’s Playhouse is a jazz club located on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem, founded by the jazz saxophonist Henry Minton in 1938. It was the crucible of the formation of bebop. Monk was the pianist in the house band together with Joe Guy on trumpet, Nick Fenton on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. In addition, Charlie Christian, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were regular performers. It closed in 1974. See R. Gottlieb (ed.), Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Random House, 1996). 140 Lee Krasner to Barbara Rose, interview of March 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 3774. 141 Ibid. 142 Quoted after R. Hobbs, Lee Krasner (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1993), ‘artist’s statements’, p. 100. 143 In addition to jazz piano, Scott also played classical repertoire (and was well known for ‘jazzing the classics’, the first to arrange Bach’s music for example). She won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music when she was eight. She played sax in Lil Hardin’s Band (Hardin was Armstrong’s wife 1924–38). She was also the first black

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

144

145

146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

161

162 163 164 165 166

289

woman to host her own TV show (in the late 1940s). The recollection of Armstrong at the piano may be a little confused. See Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford University Press, 2016). J. Little, ‘Remembering Lee Krasner’, East Hampton Star, 7 December 1984, II–I. See G. Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, HarperCollins, 2011), p. 180. Indeed, the club was politically radical, often raising monies for left-wing causes, and in 1947 Barney Josephson’s brother Leon was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led to hostile comments in the press and the closure of the club the following year. Quoted after Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography, p. 181. B. Fer, On Abstract Art (Yale University Press, 1997), p. 50. See for example Y-A. Bois, ‘Du projet au procès’ in L’Atelier de Mondrian: Dessins (Paris: Macula, 1982). V. P. Rembert, Mondrian in the USA (Parkstone Press, Ltd, 2002), p. 76. Quoted after G. Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography, p. 182. See E. G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York, Abrams, 1995), No. 97. Oil on canvas, 61 × 76.3 cm (24 × 30 in.), private collection. Charmion von Wiegand (interview with Margit Rowell, 20 June 1971) in Guggenheim, 83–4. George Mercer to Lee Krasner, 23 February 1942, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina (Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, State University of New York). Quoted after E. Nairne (ed.), Lee Krasner Living in Colour (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019), p. 83. For more on this see S. Torrance and F. Schumann, ‘The spur of the moment: what jazz improvisation tells cognitive science’ in AI and Society (2019, 34), pp. 251–68. Man with Yellow Hands (1944), collection Darrell and Lisa Walker; Couple Kissing (1945), The Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection. Quoted after R. Bearden and H. Henderson, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 320. ‘Oral history interview with Norman Lewis’, 14 July 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. For more on this see J. C. Stewart, ‘Beyond Category: Before Afrofuturism There Was Norman Lewis’ in R. Fine (ed.), Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, University of California Press, 2015), pp. 161–92. See J. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (1937, reprinted with annotation and introduction by M. E. Allentuck (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Lee Krasner to Barbara Novak, unpublished WGBH-TV interview 1979, quoted after G. Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (2011), p. 186. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (1937), p. 158. He later deleted many of these names, but their presence in the first edition remains significant. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (1937), p. 135. Max Roach quoted after P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 192. C. Nemser, Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), p. 90.

290

Improvision

167 For a number of years he worked at Dartington Hall in Devon where he was good friends with the potter Bernard Leach. 168 For more on this, see B. Winther-Tamaki, ‘Mark Tobey, white writing for a Janusfaced America’, Word & Image (13:1), pp. 77–91. 169 R. Russell, ‘Bebop’, in M. T. Williams (ed.), The Age of Jazz: Ragtime to Bebop (New York: Da Capo, 1959), p. 197. 170 The other musicians on this recording are Charlie Parker (alto sax), Miles Davis (trumpet), Lucky Thompson (tenor sax), Dodo Marmarosa (piano), Arvin Garrison (guitar), Vic McMillan (bass) and Roy Porter (drums), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ce2kzr9ZvgI. 171 S. DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 27. 172 On this last concept, see P. B. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York University Press, 2015). 173 Quoted after A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 12. 174 Quoted after P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago, 1994), p. 305. 175 So called by Lewis in ‘Lewis oral history interviews’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 176 See Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, p. 322. ‘One morning, fishing off Long Island, he recalled, “it was foggy, and the sky and water catalyzed so that you could not see the point where they fell together. Fog, this ethereal filter, fascinated me. It became the dominant undertone in much of my painting then.” ’ p. 322. 177 See Stewart, ‘Beyond Category’, pp. 161–92. 178 Compare fn. 170 above with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqNTltOGh5c. 179 As Miles Davis reported in his autobiography: ‘Many blacks felt that since I had the top small group in jazz and was paying the most money that I should have a black piano player [. . .] Then a lot of people were saying he [Bill Evans] didn’t play fast enough and hard enough for them, that he was too delicate’ (Davis (with Q. Troupe), Miles: The Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 221. 180 The rest of the album, the last two tracks (side two of the LP, ‘All Blue’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’) were recorded on 22 April. Both dates were in Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York. The LP was released on 17 August 1959. 181 A. Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis’ Masterpiece (London: Granta, 2001), p. 96. 182 S. Barrett has suggested that another way of characterizing the harmonic content of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is to think of it as all drawn from a single C Aeolian scale (thus C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, B♭,). See ‘Kind of Blue and the economy of modal jazz’, Popular Music, vol. 25, no. 2, 2006, pp. 185–200. 183 See Barrett (2006), pp. 189–90. 184 Quoted after A. Kahn, Kind of Blue (2001), p. 136. 185 Liner notes by Bill Evans for Kind of Blue (Columbia records, produced by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend, recorded 2 March and 22 April 1959, released 17 August 1959). 186 H. Ghent, Oral History interview Norman Lewis, 10 and 17 October 1973 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). 187 Ibid.

Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm

291

188 The period in the 1920s and 1930s when the cultural repercussions of jazz’s rise were most visibly felt. 189 ‘An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock’ by B. H. Friedman in Jackson Pollock: Black and White, exhibition for Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Inc. New York, 1969, pp. 7–10. 190 J. Pollock, ‘My Painting’ in Possibilities, I, New York, Winter 1947–8. Reprinted in E. Johnson (ed.), American Artists on Art (New York, 1982, p. 2). 191 Pollock interview with William Wright for the Sag Harbor radio station, taped 1950, but never broadcast. Reprinted in Hans Namuth, Pollock Painting, edited and introduced by Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1978). 192 Quoted after P. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, p. 207. 193 The first English translation was by C. B. Hogan and G. Kubler and published by Yale University Press in 1942, the year before his death. The essay ‘In Praise of Hands’ was not included in this first English edition. 194 It is only within such a conception, Bergson argues, that determinism can even be conceived. 195 See P. Brunette and D. Wills (eds), ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art Media, Architecture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 196 H. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. C. B. Hogan and G. Kubler, (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 149. 197 Brunette and Wills (eds), ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, p. 28. 198 Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, 1911 (reprinted New York: Random House, 1944), discussed on p. 9 and p. 370. 199 Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 156. 200 Ibid, pp. 175–6. 201 David Amram quoted after A. Kahn, Kind of Blue (2008), p. 28. 202 Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 178. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid, p. 180. 205 Ibid, p. 184. 206 Verdier, quoted after E. Crichton-Miller, ‘The Rhythm of the Universe’ in Fabienne Verdier, Rhythms and Reflections (Waddington Custot, 2016), p. 21 (from the exhibition of the same title 25 November 2016–4 February 2017). 207 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx_xWIoOEjA. 208 Quoted after L. Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon: An essay on the theory and practice of art in China and Japan, based on original sources (London: John Murray, 1911), p. 61. 209 T. C. Roholt, Groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 136. 210 Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 178. 211 Verdier, quoted after E. Crichton-Miller, ‘The Rhythm of the Universe’, p. 24. 212 Earlier paintings that operate on art–music relationships are ‘Fugue de Bach’ (‘Bach Fugue’, 1992), ‘Cinabre et Sérénade’ (1997) and ‘Hommage aux variations sans thème de Yehudi Menuhin’ (‘Hommage to Yehudi Menuhin’s Variations Without a Theme’, 1997). More recently, in 2011 and, especially in 2013, Verdier’s ‘Polyphonie’ series is a dazzling example of this idea of dialogic painting.

292

Improvision

213 The music of the record label ECM was described by the magazine Coda as ‘the most beautiful sound next to silence’. F. Marmande, ‘ECM: In search of free jazz and free expression’, The Guardian, 26 March 2013 (see https://www.theguardian. com/music/2013/mar/26/manfred-eicher-ecm-jazz-review, accessed 25 August 2018). 214 She also worked with the jazz bass teacher Ray Drummond. 215 The character ᴨ (shū) means script in this context (it can also mean ‘book’), and the character 㥹 means quick, or rough. Thus, the name of this script is literally ‘rough script’. The same character 㥹 appears in this sense in the noun ‘rough draft’ (㥹は), and the verb ‘to draft [e.g. a document] (㥹ᬜ). 216 B. Newman, The Ideographic Picture (exhibition catalogue for Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1947), reprinted in E. Johnson (ed.), American Artists on Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 15. Newman gets the definition from the Century Dictionary. 217 Such an interest in the ideogram is much wider and occurs in Ezra Pound’s and Charles Olson’s poetry, Barnet Newman, Theodoros Stamos, Adolph Gottlieb, etc. For more on this see D. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. pp. 78–99. Quotation p. 99. 218 This and other quotes from the artist come from Mark Kidel’s film The Juilliard Experiment (Calliope Media) (see http://thejuilliardexperiment.com/, accessed 25 August 2018). 219 Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 179.

Index Page mumbers in bold refer to figures. 2e Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 1re partie 3 motifs (R. Delaunay), 105 369th US Infantry, Hell Fighters Band, 41 Abbaye de Créteil group, 64 Abraham, R. H., 53 absolute music, 2, 3, 5–6, 27, 55–6, 95–6, 162, 174 Abstract Expressionism, 2, 250–1, 270–1, 271 Krasner, 250–1, 253–4, 254, 255, 256–60, 258 Lewis, 253–4, 255, 256, 260–4, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266–7 Pollock, 251–3 abstract mimesis, 58–9 abstract painting, 34 abstraction, 2, 3–5, 6, 33, 144, 179 jazz, 54, 58–61 post-cubist inclination towards, 52 process, 3 Adderley, Cannonball, 267–71, 269 Adkins, Darrett, 279, 282 Adorno, T., 97, 196–7 ‘Über Jazz’, 7–10 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 53 aesthetic ambition, 36 aesthetic instinct, 87–8 aesthetic timbre, 59 African art, 27, 98, 260, 262 African music, 20 African tribal shows, 22 African-American choirs, 22 African-American culture, 24, 27, 98, 219–20 Afro-American music content, 2 Allen, Reuben, 279 ambiguity, 183–4

American Abstract Artists (AAA), 256, 260 American art, politics of, 203n15 American music, 30 Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Kupka), 65, 66 ‘Amorphism Manifesto, 1913’ (Picabia), 156 Anémic Cinéma (Duchamp), 239 Ansermet, Ernest, 41–4, 51n118, 89n30, 129 anti-music, 29 Apollinaire. Guillaume, 31, 52, 53, 54, 57, 64, 97, 97–8, 100, 108, 109, 119, 126, 136, 222, 223 analysis of Orphism, 112–5 on Braque, 113 calligrammes, 115, 116, 119 on Duchamp, 100 and music, 116 on Picabia, 100, 117 on Picasso, 112 understanding of the fourth dimension, 98, 99 Apollo, 98–9, 102 Appel, Alfred, 2, 60 Aristotle, 146 Aristoxenus of Tarentum, 195–6, 196 Armory Show: New York 1913, 121, 165, 167, 223 Armstrong, Louis, 11, 22, 174, 210n146 abstraction, 58–60 Basin Street Blues, 70–1, 70 contribution, 59 improvisation, 91–2n74 intuitive approach, 70–1 ‘Potato Head Blues’, 9 art coefficient, the, 236–7 Art of Spiritual Harmony (Kandinsky), 164–7

293

294 artist, role of, 236–7 artistic control, 160 artistic power, 147 artistic responses, relativity of, 216 artistic symbolism, 241 Aspen (5/6), 161 asymmetry, 99 Atkins, Taylor, 104 audience, role of, 235, 246–7, 249 audio-visual machines, 186–7 Austad, Eivind, 47n41 authenticity, 164 authorial responsibility, 42–3 automatic écriture, 280–1, 280 Aux Frontières du jazz (Goffin), 83–8 avant-garde, the, 6, 10–1, 17 Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the Sun) (Duchamp), 226, 227, 228–30, 229, 231 Baker, George, 150, 152 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 219 Bal Bullier, 109, 111 Bal Bullier (S. Delaunay), 110–2 Ballet Russe, 63–4 Banjo (Gleizes), 129–30 Barrett, Samuel, 267 Barron, Kenny, 279, 280 Barthes, Roland, 4, 160–1 Bateau-Lavoir, 56 Bauer, Harold Victor, 166, 206n76 beauty, 97–8 bebop, 7 bebop jazz, 264 Bechet, Sidney, 37, 44 Belgrad, Daniel, 281 Bell, Clive, 6, 7, 55 Benedettini, Paolo, 279, 281 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 134, 174–5 Benson, Bruce Ellis, 162, 174 Benton, Thomas Hart, 178–9 Berg, Frode, 17–8 Bergson, Henri, 61, 71, 81, 85, 86, 105, 109–10, 113–4, 180, 195, 200, 216, 222, 273 Berliner, Paul, 9, 20, 81, 85 Berlinger, Joseph, 187 Bernstein, Leonard, 173, 268 Beuys, Joseph, 241

Index Bicycle Wheel (Duchamp), 237–8, 238, 239 binary drives, 1–2, 27 binary oppositions, 35–6 binary tensions, 31 Birdwhistle, Ray L., 5 black Atlantic rhythm, 24–5 black culture, 22, 31 black diaspora, art of the, 3–4 black music, views of, 4 Black Smile (Kupka), 76–7 Blake, Jody, 27 blues, the, 43–4, 267–71 Bock syncopé (Kupka), 74 body, Kupka and the, 65–6 Bonds, Mark Evan, 102 boogie-woogie, 256–7 Boone, John William ‘Blind’, 38 Box of 1914, The (Duchamp), 226, 227, 228–30, 229 Bradlee, Scott, 49n92 Braque, George, 6, 56, 113 Breunig, LeRoy, 98 Brexit, 247 Brötzmann, Peter, 241–2 Bruce, Patrick Henry, 249 brushstroke, importance of, 4 Buffet, Gabrielle, 117, 117–8, 119, 124, 125–7, 133, 141–2n130, 144, 147, 153 Burleigh, Harry, 41, 51n111 Cabaret Dancer (Kupka), 73 Café Society Uptown, New York, 256–7 Caffin, Charles, 121–2, 126 Cage, John, 245, 246 Campbell, Colin, 26 Caoutchouc (Picabia), 118 Carlyle and Wellman, 22 Carter, Marva, 40 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 202 Casino de Paris, 39–40 Cassou, Jean, 217 Cendrar, Blaise, 109, 114 La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 105, 106, 107–8 chance, 274, 275 change, rate of, 62 Chanson nègre I (Picabia), 122–5, 123, 131

Index Chanson nègre II (Picabia), 122–5, 124, 131 Chauvin, Louis, 38 Chevalier, Jean-Claude, 98 Chevalier, Maurice, 28 Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 Chinese art theory, 190, 192–4, 211n176 Chocolat, 22–3 Christie, William, 279 Chua, Daniel, 55, 184 Circulaires et rectilignes (Kupka), 74 classical music, 2, 19, 25–6, 41, 96, 103, 162–3, 166–7, 174 Clef Club, 40–1, 51n110 Clef Club Orchestra, 41 Clifton, Thomas, 200, 213n218 Closerie des Lilas, 54, 64 Cobb, Jimmy, 267–71 Cohen, Greg, 182 Coleman, Ornette, 7, 163, 232–6, 234, 238, 252–3 Coleman, Patrick, 185 colore, 25 colour, 100, 164, 215–6, 221, 249 colour contrast, 110–1 colour theory, 104 Coltrane, John, 267–71 Comb (Duchamp), 155–6, 158, 158 commonplace, the, 278–9 communication, 5, 175 Complete Writings on Art (Kandinsky), 210n149 composition art, 190, 190–1, 191 music, 162 pictorial, 147 Composition (Gleizes), 129 Composition pour Jazz (Gleizes), 130 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 85, 117, 179 connectivity, 177 contests, 37 context, 176 contextual approach, 3 Cook, Will Marion, 29, 40–1, 42, 51n108 coon shows, 22 Cooper, Harry, 179 counter-culture, 24 craft, 6

295

creative energies, 10 creativity, spontaneous, 80–1 Cross, Earl, 243 Csikszentmihályi, Mihaly, 113, 140n85 Cubism, 61, 104, 127–8, 130, 136, 167 Cubism, orphic, 100–1, 222 cubist theory, 97 cultural alterity, 17 cultural identity, 24, 27 cultural exchange, 19 cultural modernity, 26 culture, commodification of, 6 culture industry, 10 Curtis, Natalie, 41, 127–9, 142n139 Dada, 2, 31 Damrosch, Dr F., 104 dance, 28, 62–4, 109, 110, 196 Danto, Arthur, 195 Danzatrice = mare or Dancer = Airplane + Sea (Severini), 115 Dapogny, James, 59, 60 Davidson, Jo, 122 Davis, Arthur B., 121 Davis, Belle, 22 Davis, Miles, 11, 59, 251–2, 274, 290n178 “In a Silent Way”, 4 Kind of Blue, 267, 278 ‘So What’, 94n139 Davis, Stuart, 2 Davis, Whitney, 197 Dayan, Peter, 175 de Duve, Thierry, 155–6, 161–2, 164, 218, 221 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 95 de Zayas, Marius, 144, 149–50 definition, problems of, 16–20 Delaunay, Henri Pierre Charles, 108–12 Delaunay, Robert, 52, 57, 104–5, 108, 109–10, 112, 116, 149, 249 2e Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 1re partie 3 motifs, 105 Formes circulaires, 114 Orphic cubism, 100 prismes series, 111 Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 2e partie 5 motifs, 105, 110

296 Delaunay, Sonia, 104, 109–10, 112 Bal Bullier, 110–2 La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 105, 106, 107–8 Prismes électriques, 110, 111 DeLue, Rachael, 201 Derrida, J., 17, 31, 32–5, 95, 163, 174–5, 208n110, 231–6, 234, 238, 273 DeVeaux, Scott, 264 Dhuys, Lucien, 53–4 dialogical musical processes, 20 dialogue, 59 Dickens, Charles, 161 Dionysian jazz, 98–100 Dionysius, 54, 63–4, 98, 99, 101 Discs Bearing Spirals (Duchamp), 239 discursive practice, 21–2 disegno, 25 Disques noirs syncopés (Kupka), 74 dissonance, 98 Divertimento (Kupka), 74 Donce-Brisy, Emile, 69 doodles and doodling, 228, 230–1 Dove, Arthur Garfield, 2, 76, 167–84, 188–9, 200–2, 230 calligraphic style, 167–8 Fog Horns, 183, 183 gramophone records, 177–80 in the groove, 180–4 improvisation practice, 167–84, 168, 175–7 Improvision, 167, 169 The Inn, 180 jazz paintings, 167–8, 175 and listening, 194 marks, 169–72, 193 Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin, 193 process, 182–3 Rhapsody in Blue: Part I, 169, 171–2, 171, 182, 183–4, 200 Rhapsody in Blue: Part II, 170, 170 translations, 174–7, 178, 179 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 190–1, 191 drawing, definition, 226 Dregni, Michael, 109 drunkenness, 103 Du Bois, W. E. B., 36

Index Duchamp, Marcel, 11, 52, 64, 112, 119, 125, 144, 249, 274 abandonment of painting, 161–2 Anémic Cinéma, 239 Apollinaire on, 99–100 approach to abstraction, 224 approach to text, 116 Armory Show: New York 1913, 121 arrival in Paris, 56–7 Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the/nlSun), 226, 227, 228–30, 229, 231, 275 Bicycle Wheel, 237–8, 238, 239 The Box of 1914, 226, 227, 228–30, 229 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 220 Comb, 155–6, 158, 158 The Creative Act’, 160–1, 220, 236–7 and Cubism, 61 Discs Bearing Spirals, 239 Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star), 222–3, 224 Erratum Musical, 225, 226 Étant donnés, 220 Flirt, 68 Green Box, 159–60, 161 With Hidden Noise, 159 inter-art analogue, 73 and Kupka, 56–7 L.H.O.O.Q., 12 machine imagery, 74 mechanical drawing, 220–1 musical perception, 224–6 musical perceptions, 116 Nude, Sonata, 224–5 Nude Descending a Staircase, 65, 222–3 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 119, 121, 223–4 objects, 237–40, 238 Orphic cubism, 100 passage from painting to readymade, 220–1 The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 218, 218–22 piano pun, 68 Portrait of Dr R. Dumouchel, 57–8 readymades, 12, 152–3, 155–62, 158, 164, 204n32, 237–40 Rotorelief, 239–40

Index titles, 226 The White Box, 160 and words, 119–21, 238–9 Duncan, Greg, 279 Duncan, Isadora, 63–4 Dvoøák, Antonin, 30, 40, 41, 51n111 dynamic sensation, 109 ecstasy, 98 Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 165, 166–7 Edison, Thomas, 2 Edison Realism Test, 185–6 Edtaonisl (ecclésiastique) (Picabia), 131, 135, 135 Edward T., 5, 12 Edwards, Cliff ‘Ukelele Ike’, 20 Edwards, Eddie, 87 Eisenberg, Evan, 38 Eliot, T.S., 6, 14n25, 14n26 elitism, 11 Ellington, Duke, 36, 266 Ellison, Ralph, 1 Elsdon, Peter, 181 embodied cognition, 163–4 embodied knowledge, 35–6, 44 embodiment, 163–4, 274–5 emergence, 193, 230–1 emergent jazz sensibility, 1 emotional intensity, 240–1 emotional life, 26 Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star) (Duchamp), 222–3, 224 Energetics II (Kupka), 76 Enlightenment modernity, 1, 26 equivalence, 146 Erickson, Robert, 59 Erratum Musical (Duchamp), 225, 226 essentialism, 80 ethnographic exhibitions, 48n60 Étude pour Jazz-hot (Kupka), 78, 79, 80 étude pour La Douceur de vivre (Kupka), 77–8, 77 Eudia (Kupka), 74 Europe, James Reese, 40–1 European context, 19–20, 22–4 Evans, Bill, 215, 267–71, 278 Ewen, David, 173 exclusion, 10 Exposition Universelle 1878, 22

297

expression, 1 crisis of, 155–6 unit of, 4, 5 expressivity, 59 extemporization, 59, 217, 228 Faulkner, Anne Shaw, 90n48 Femme cueillant des fleurs sequence (Kupka), 65–6 Fenollosa, Ernest, 190 Ferneyhough, Brian, 11 figurative, the, 146 figure, the, role of, 61 Fille Née sans Mère (Picabia), 152 film, 156 Fink, Henry, 102–3 First World War, 22 Flirt (Duchamp), 68 flow state, the, 113, 140n85 Focillon, Henri, 34–5, 272, 273–5, 278–9 Fog Horns (Dove), 183, 183 Folies Bergères, 22 Footit, George, 22–3 form, 215–6, 221 Formes circulaires (R. Delaunay), 114 Foster, Hal, 9, 26, 87–8 Foucault, Michel, 21 found object, the, 31, 149, 152 fourth dimension, 61, 64, 98, 99 Fragson, Harry, 28, 48n56 France emergence of jazz in, 39–40, 40–1, 41 encounter with black cultures, 22–4 free jazz, 7, 240–1, 253 free music, 201 freedom, 86, 231 freewill, 81 French cultural identity, 24 Frost, Arthur Burdett, 249 frozen music, 198–9 Fry, Roger, 165 Fuller, Buckminster, 248 fusion, 45n11 Futurists, 149 Gabric, Lukas, 279, 281 Garrett, Charles, 21 Gauguin, Paul, 164 Gautier, Maximilian, 154, 155

298 gender performativity, 163 Genova, Pamela, 112 geometry, 75, 216 Gershwin, George, 169, 176 Rhapsody in Blue, 172, 172–4 gestural marks, 188 gesture, 249–71 abstract expressionism, 250–1 Chinese art theory, 193 expressivity, 271–2 feel of, 275, 278 and improvisation, 11–2 integrity, 275 and mental states, 71 musical, 5, 163 in painting, 12 and rhythmic integration, 66–73 role of, 33–4 Gilroy, Paul, 3, 19, 24, 30 Gioia, Ted, 21 Glaser, Matt, 58–9 Gleizes, Albert, 57, 136 Banjo, 129–30 Composition, 129 Composition pour Jazz, 130 jazz paintings, 129–31, 130 in New York, 127–9 ‘Global Groove’ (Paik), 247–8, 248–9 Goehr, Lydia, 5, 160 Goffin, Robert, Aux Frontières du jazz, 83–8 Gombrich, E. H., 230 Gorman, Ross, 173 Graham, John, 261–3, 272 gramophone records, role of, 177–80 gramophoning, 184–7, 187 Grappelli, Stéphane, 108–9 Greek myths, 53–4 Greeks, Ancient, 96–7 Green Box (Duchamp), 159–60, 161 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 10, 250 Gris, Juan, 56, 57 Grofé, Ferde, 173 groove, 180–4, 278 Gross, Klaus-Dieter, 36 group improvisation, 267–71 Groupe de Puteaux, 57, 61, 64, 120 Guillaume, Paul, 27, 31 Guzuguzu, 17–8

Index Hampton, Pete, 22 Hancock, Herbie, 94n139, 251–2 Hanhardt, John, 248 harmony, 25, 33, 43, 44, 131, 147 Harper, Phillip Brian, 3, 59 hearing, seeing, 160 Heidegger, Martin, 103 Hell Fighters Band, 41 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 61 Herbert, James, 193, 230–1, 232–3 Hersch, Fred, 272 Higgins, Kathleen, 101–2 high art, 6 high modernism, 10 high-modernism, 11 Hodier, André, 4 Hoeckner, Berthold, 196 Hofmann, Hans, 250–1, 260 Hokusai, 274 Holtzman, Harry, 256 Homer, William, 149 Hopkins, Ernest J., 16, 16, 20 Horace, 146 Hot Club de France, 80, 108, 109 hot jazz, 80, 80–2, 87 Hot Jazz (Kupka), 74, 182 Hudson, Kenneth, 1 Huyssen, Andreas, 10 hybridity, 19, 21, 23–4, 24–5, 30–1, 36 hyperspace philosophy, 65 Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz/ Foi et Amour (Picabia), 150, 151, 152 idealist philosophy, 61 identity, 1, 21, 33 ideograms, 115–6, 281 ideology, and style, 25 illumination, 114–5 imitation, 32 immediacy, 163 improvisation Derrida’s conception of, 231–6 framework, 28 and gesture, 11–2 and jazz, 1–3, 8, 11, 162–4 motive of, 166 music, 162–4 tradition of, 2–3

Index Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love II) (Kandinsky), 165, 167 Improvision (Dove), 167, 168, 169–70 “In a Silent Way” (Davis), 4 indeterminism, 248 indexicality, 152 industrial modernity, 1 industrialization, 193, 156, 161 Insistent White Line (Kupka), 70 inspiration, 82 instinctive cubism, 100 intention, 236–7 inter-art analogue, 71–2 inter-arts thinking, 81–2 interior state, expression of, 180–1 interiority, 20 interpretation, music, 182 intertextuality, 4 intuition, 65, 86, 113, 216 intuitive intelligence, 86 inventiveness, 14n32 invisibility, and visibility, 55–6 Iyer, Vijay, 163–4, 176, 177 Jarrett, Keith, 181, 252 jazz abstraction, 3–5 Adorno on, 7–10 alterity, 17 application of term, 18–9 central aesthetic characteristic, 226 conditions of, 5–7 definition, 9, 18–9, 20–2 dialogical musical processes, 20 dissemination of, 83–4, 87, 103 emergence in Europe, 39–44, 84 ephemeral perception of, 26 etymological survey, 18 European context, 22–4 first application of term, 16–7, 44–5n2 Goffin’s analysis, 83–8 hybridity, 19, 21, 23–4, 24–5 and improvisation, 1–3, 8, 11, 162–4 Le Jazz (Schaeffner), 83–4 liminality, 21 live performance, 12 materiality, 25–6, 185–7 and modernism, 1–2, 7, 11

299

modernity and, 20 musical gesture, 5 musical meaning, 103–4 mutablility, 153 origin of term, 18 periodization, 21 physicality, 179 position, 55 and recording, 12 rhythm, 4, 8, 9 root in sex slang, 18 timbre, 4–5, 9 virulence, 62 and visual abstraction, 54 visual presence, 55–6 jazz abstraction, 58–61 Jazz Club Universitaire, 108 jazz criticism, 19 Jazz Kings, 39–40 jazz modernism, 1–2, 7, 54–6, 60 Jazz Movement (Kupka), 74 jazz performance, culture of, 9 jazz spirit, 2 jazz theory, 6 Jeanneret, Albert, 75 Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Picabia), 149, 150, 151, 152, 152–3 Jiang Kuí, 193 Johansen, Per Oddvar, 17–8 Joplin, Scott, 28, 29, 37, 47n52 Treemonisha, 36 Jordan, Joe, 38 Jorden, Matthew, 24–5 judgement, equivalence of, 146 Kandinsky, Wassily, 6, 11, 22, 53, 178–9, 179, 219, 221, 228, 237, 249 Complete Writings on Art, 210n149 Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 85, 117, 179, 216 Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love II), 165, 167 inter-arts thinking, 82 and materiality, 184, 217–8 point-to-line-to-plane, 189 Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 178 Reminiscences, 215–8 Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 53, 164–7, 167

300

Index

Kant, I., 5 Katz, Mark, 185, 186–7 kazoo, the, 154–5, 204n29 Keil, Charles, 5 Kidel, Mark, 279 Kind of Blue (Davis), 267, 267–71, 269, 278 kitsch, 6, 9–10, 10 klang, 216 Klee, Paul, 60, 230, 230–1, 243 Pedagogical Sketchbook, 70 Klein, Franz, 271 Kootz, Samuel, 3 Kornstad, Hakon, 7 Kramer, Laurence, 180–1 Krasner, Lee, 2, 250, 250–1, 251, 253, 253–4, 256–60, 262, 263, 271, 271–2 Mosaic Collage, 257, 258 Night Light, 254 Nightlife, 259–60 Untitled c. 1948, 253–4, 255, 256, 257 Kubota, Shigeko, 240 Kühl, Gustav, 35–6 Kuhn, Walt, 121 Kulbin, Nikolai, 201 Kupka, František, 52, 64–75, 95, 112, 118 abstracted visual forms, 58 aesthetic, 53, 65–6, 76 aesthetic ambition, 74 Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs, 65, 66 background, 57–8 Black Smile, 76–7 Bock syncopé, 74 and the body, 65–6 Cabaret Dancer, 73 Circulaires et rectilignes, 74 and Cubism, 61 cultural backdrop, 73 Disques noirs syncopés, 74 Divertimento, 74 and Duchamp, 56–7 Energetics II, 76 Étude pour Jazz-hot, 78, 79, 80 étude pour La Douceur de vivre, 77–8, 77 Eudia, 74 Femme cueillant des fleurs sequence, 65–6 Hot Jazz, 74, 182

Insistent White Line, 70 inter-art analogue, 70–2 inter-arts thinking, 81–2 interest in science and technology, 87 and intuitive intelligence, 86 Jazz Movement, 73, 74 jazz paintings, 75–80, 77, 79 La Création dans les arts plastiques, 53 Le Trait Obsédant, 71 Lines and Planes in Tango Rhythm, 74, 76 machine imagery, 74–5, 75–80 Music, 76 Nocturne, 65–6, 66 Orphic tendency, 53, 54 Piano Keys/ Lake, 66–9, 67, 74 Prometheus Bound series, 53 quest for utopian unity, 54 relationship to Orphism, 64 relationship with music, 81–2, 87, 88 rhythmic integration of gesture, 66–73 Solo of a Brown Line, 70, 71–2, 72, 99 spiritualism, 64 and spontaneous creativity, 80–1 Syncopated Accompaniment (staccato), 77 syntax of representation, 65 Synthesis, 74 titles, 72 vision, 64–5 Kupka, František, La Création dans les arts plastiques, 77–8 La Goulue, 73 La Musique est comme la Peinture (Music is Like Painting) (Picabia), 144, 145–50, 145 La Procéssion, Séville (Picabia), 121–2 La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (S. Delaunay), 105, 106, 107–8 La revue blanche, 23 Lacy, Steve, 250 Laforgue, Jules, 222–3, 226 Lamb, Joseph, 28 Lane, Jeremy, 27, 83, 84 Langer, Suzanne, 199–200 language, 83, 114, 115–7, 118, 175, 263 and music, 32–3

Index musicality of, 17–8 Lapize, Octave, 228–9 Lasser, Philip, 279 Latour, Bruno, 11 Le cake-walk des petites filles (Villon), 62–3, 63 Le Corbusier, 75 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 100 Le Jazz (Schaeffner), 83–4 Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait (Picabia), 150, 151, 152 Le Trait Obsédant (Kupka), 71 Léger, Fernand, 2, 52–3, 57, 74, 100 Leighten, Patricia, 73 Leonardo da Vinci, 104 Les joyeux nègres, 23–4 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 197, 237 Lewis, Norman, 2, 253–4, 255, 256, 260–4, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266–7, 271 Lex, 107 lexis, 20, 24, 107 L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp), 12 Lien, Helge, 17–8, 45n8 light, 149 L’Illustration, 24 liminality, 21 line, freedom of, 60 linear movement, 178–9 Lines and Planes in Tango Rhythm (Kupka), 74, 76 listener, role of the, 176–7, 177–80 listening, 194 live performance, 12 London, 39 McDonald, Christie, 175 MacDonald-Wright, Stanton, 249–50 ‘Machine Gun’ (Brötzmann), 241 machine imagery, 74–5, 75–80 madness, 98 Manny, Charlie, 22 Marsalis, Wynton, 4, 58 materiality, 25–6, 31, 184–7, 217–8 Matisse, Henri, 63 meaning, source of, 235 mechanical drawing, 144, 145–50, 145, 148, 151, 152–3, 156, 220–1 mechanical reproduction, 12

301

melody, 43, 44, 99, 147 melos, 11–2, 20, 107 memory, 109–10, 110, 117–8 mental states, and gesture, 71 Mercer, George, 259 meta-modernism, 11 meta-narrative, 36 metre, 28 Metzinger, Jean, 57, 64, 96–7, 97, 98 ‘Note on Painting’, 61–2 Meyer, Leonard, 5 mimesis, 6, 33, 58–9, 144 mind/body split, 103 Mingus, Charles, 36 minstrel shows, 22 minstrelsy tradition, 2, 23 Mitchel, W. J. T., 146 Mitchell, Louis, 39–40 modernism, 1–2, 6, 10–2, 19, 20, 26, 36, 88 binary tension, 10–2 hierarchy, 164 and jazz, 1–2, 11 jazz, 54–6, 60 and music, 7 orphic trend, 53 relationship to jazz, 4 theories of, 27 modernist formalism, 6 modernist theories, 4 modernity, 1 cultural, 26 dark side of, 73 Enlightenment, 26 jazz and, 20 music as, 25–7 modernization, 26 Modigliani, Amadeo, 56 moment, the, 273–4 Mondrian, Piet, 256–9 mongrelization, 7 Montmartre, 56, 57 Montparnasse, 56 Morrison, Tom, 31 Morton, Jelly Roll, 21, 43, 174 Mosaic Collage (Krasner), 257, 258 motion, representation of, 65 motor activity, and sensory impressions, 70 motor intentionality, 181–2

302 ‘Mouth Music’ (Paik), 245–6 movement, 110–2 MTV, 247 music Apollinaire and, 116 composition, 162 concept of, 100–1 conditions of, 5–7, 162 for Derrida, 175 embodiment, 44, 163–4 functions, 102–3 improvisation, 162–4 interpretation, 182 and language, 32–3 materiality, 184–7 as modernity, 25–7 modes, 55 mythic streams, 102 Picabia and, 117–9 power of, 101–2, 147, 175, 223 purist aspiration, 96 visual presence, 55–6 Music (Kupka), 76 musical discourse, 21 musical gesture, 5, 163 musical instruments, as readymades, 242–3 musical manuscript paper, 228 musical meaning, 103–4 musical perception, 224–6 musical recording, 2 musicality, 247 of language, 17–8 Nakamura, Jeanne, 140n85 Napierkowska, Stacia, 124, 133–4, 134, 142n159 national exhibitions, 22 national identity, 20 nature, relativity of artistic responses to, 216 needs, 26 Negative Capability, 231–2 nègre, the, 31 Neo-Impressionism, 149 neoclassicism, 45n12 neo-romanticism, 11 New York, 121–5, 127–9, 144, 165, 173, 225, 256–7

Index New York Herald, 40, 123 New York Times, 103 Newman, Barnet, 281 newness, 6–7 Nicholson, Stuart, 4 Nietzsche, F., 7, 54, 97–8, 98–9, 101–2, 195–6 Night Light (Krasner), 254 nightclubs, 83–4 Nightlife (Krasner), 259–60 nikoniko, 18 Nocturne (Kupka), 65–6, 66 nomenclature, shifts in, 164 non-verbal communication, 5 notation, 159–61 Nouveau Cirque, 22–4 Nude, Sonata (Duchamp), 224–5 Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp), 65, 222–3 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Duchamp), 119, 121, 223–4 objects, 240–3, 244, 245–9 Duchamp, 237–40, 238 and sound, 159–60 O’Doherty, Brian, 161, 250 Oliver, Joseph ‘King’, 58–9 Oller, Joseph, 22–3 On the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 164–7, 216 Ong, Walter, 95–6 onomatopoeia, 17–8, 20 opsis, 11–2, 20, 107 oral cultures, 95–6 Original Dixieland Jass Band, 155 originality, 163 Orpheus, 53–4, 67–8, 101–2, 102, 103, 113, 116, 120, 147, 222, 223, 224 Orphic cubism, 100–1, 222 Orphic European sensibility, 2 Orphic jazz, 102–4 Orphic tendency, 52, 53 Orphism Apollinaire’s perspective, 112–5 definition, 52–3 Kupka and, 64 movement, 52 Ovid, 67–8, 150, 152

Index Pach, Walter, 121 Paik, Nam June, 240 Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, 241–3, 244, 245–6 ‘Global Groove’, 247–8, 248–9 ‘Mouth Music’, 245–6 Zen for Walking, 243, 244, 245 painterly expression, 263 Panassié, Hugues, 80, 87 Panico, Louis, 71 Parker, Charlie, 264 Passage from Virgin to Bride, The (Duchamp), 218, 218–22 Pater, W., 2, 5, 31, 58, 162, 164, 185, 191, 194, 197–8, 199, 212–3n200 Peigne (Comb) (Picabia), 153–5 performance, 26, 37–8, 42 performativity, 163 Petersen, Eugen, 194 phenomenological expression, 263 phonocentrism, 31, 32–5 phonograph, the, 2 photography, 2, 156, 201–2 physical cubism, 100 Piano Keys/ Lake (Kupka), 66–9, 67, 74 Picabia, Francis, 52, 56–7, 112, 120, 124, 220, 222 aims, 126 ‘Amorphism Manifesto, 1913’, 156 Apollinaire on, 100, 117 approach to text, 116 Armory Show: New York 1913, 121 Buffet’s support for, 125–7 Caoutchouc, 118 Chanson nègre I, 122–5, 123, 131 Chanson nègre II, 122–5, 124, 131 and Cubism, 61 Edtaonisl (ecclésiastique), 131, 135 Fille Née sans Mère, 152 Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz/ Foi et Amour, 150, 151, 152 and improvisation, 128 involvement in Orphism, 144 Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, 149, 150, 151, 152, 152–3 La Musique est comme la Peinture, (Music is Like Painting), 144, 145–50, 145 La Procéssion, Séville, 121–2

303

Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait, 150, 151, 152 mechanical drawing, 144, 145–50, 145, 148, 151, 152–3, 156 melancholy, 156–7 and music, 117–9 music analogy, 122 in New York, 121–5, 144 ‘New York series, 122–5, 123, 124 Orphic cubism, 100 Peigne (Comb), 153–5 Picabia, J’ai vu et c’est de toi qu’il s’agit, De Zayas! De Zayas! Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin, 150, 151, 152 process, 131–3, 135 relationship with music, 88 return to Paris, 131–6 titles, 135–6 Udnie; jeune fille américaine (danse), 131–6, 132 Voilà Haviland, 150, 151, 152 and words, 119 Picabia, J’ai vu et c’est de toi qu’il s’agit, De Zayas! De Zayas! Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin (Picabia), 150, 151, 152 Picasso, Pablo, 56, 64, 74, 112 Pindar, 198–9 plastic objects, 109 plastic power, 195 point-to-line-to-plane, 189 Pollitt, Jerome, 195, 196 Pollock, Jackson, 7, 251–3, 259, 260, 271, 271–2, 274 Polykleitos, 199, 213n207 popular art, 6 popular music, 8 Porter, James, 195, 198–9 post-cubist inclination, 52 Postmodern Jukebox, 49n92 post-modernism, 11 ‘Potato Head Blues’ (Armstrong), 9 Potts, Alex, 199 pregnant rests, 199–200 presentation, 162 primary visuality, 95 primitivism, 24–5, 27, 28, 30, 31, 115 Prismes électriques (S. Delaunay), 110, 111

304 procedural knowledge, 3 Prometheus, 53–4, 116 proportion, and rhythm, 96–8 propositional knowledge, 3 Pryor, Arthur, 28 Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Kandinsky), 178 pure music, 100–1, 184–5 pure painting, 164, 221 purism, 19, 118, 164 purist aspiration, 96 purity, 6, 112–3, 147, 164 purity/hybridity tension, 30–1 racial divide, 42 racism, 63, 80 racist projections, 29 racist stereotypes, 22 ragging, 60 ragtime, 27–31, 29, 35–6, 36–8, 42, 43, 49n89, 109–10, 166–7 Rasula, Jed, 4, 41 readymades, 12, 152–3, 155–62, 158, 162, 164, 204n32, 237–40, 238, 242–3 realism, aspiration to, 185–6 realization, 236–7 Reclus, Elisée, 54 recording, 12, 38, 86–7, 103, 177–80, 185–7, 207n101 referential improvisation, 58–60 referents, 156–7 Reinhardt, Ad, 270 Reinhardt, Django, 108–9 Reminiscences (Kandinsky), 215–8 repetition, 178 representation, 162 Représentation. Les Fenêtres. Simultanéité. Ville. 2e partie 5 motifs (R. Delaunay), 105, 110 reproduction, 12 Rhames, Arthur, 81, 217 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 172, 172–4 Rhapsody in Blue: Part I (Dove), 169, 182, 183–4, 200 Rhapsody in Blue: Part II (Dove), 170, 170 rhythm, 8, 9, 25, 58, 74, 83, 190–202, 249–50 and art composition, 190, 190–1, 191 black Atlantic, 24–5

Index Chinese art theory, 190, 192–4, 211n176 concept of, 4 conception of, 194–202, 213n213 embodiment, 35, 43, 190 and geometry, 75 irrational, 196 and mark-making, 190, 193–4, 202 new, 61–4 Oriental art theory, 190–4 perception as synaesthetic, 190 phenomenological absorption of, 85 and proportion, 96–8 translation and, 175 rhythmic integration, and gesture, 66–73 Roach, Max, 263 Robbins, Daniel, 129 Roberts, Ashley ‘Bob’, 22 Robinson, J. Bradford, 8 Roche, Juliette, 127 Roger-Milès, L., 117 Roholt, Tiger, 180, 181 Rothko, Mark, 251 Rotorelief (Duchamp), 239–40 Rousseau, J. J., 25, 32–3, 33–4, 85, 95, 99 Roussel, Raymond, 119, 120 Rowell, Margit, 53 Rushdie, Salman, 6–7 Russel, George, 270 Russell, Morgan, 249 Rye, Howard, 2 Sadler, Michael T. H., 165–6 Salon des Indépendants, 119, 120 Sbarbaro, Tony, 87 Schaeffner, André, Le Jazz, 83–4 Schiff, David, 172, 173 Schleifer, Ronald, 26 Schoenberg, 9 Schuller, Gunter, 58–60 Schwarz, Arturo, 220 scientific discoveries, role of, 125–6 Scott, James, 28 Sculptures Nègres exhibition, 31 Seagrove, Gordon, 17 Section d’Or, 57 Seiber, Mátyás, 8 self-expression, 9, 60

Index sense perception, translation into paint, 64–5 sensibility, 247 sensory impressions, and motor activity, 70 Severini, Gino, 109–10, 112, 115–6, 117, 149 Danzatrice = mare or Dancer = Airplane + Sea, 115 sheet music, 36–8, 51n118 Shiff, Richard, 202 signs and signification, 156–7, 184–5, 208n110 simultaneity, 104–5, 107–8 sin, 90n48 singularity, 163 Sloterdijk, Peter, 7 Smalls, James, 23 Smith, Cricket, 39 Smith, Julie Dawn, 163 Smith, Willie ‘The Lion’, 172–4 ‘So What’ (Davis), 94n139 Solo of a Brown Line (Kupka), 70, 71–2, 72, 99 song, 33 sonic simultaneity, 104 Sontag, Susan, 161 sound and objects, 159–60 prioritization of, 32–5 purist aspiration, 96 Sousa, John Philip, 27–8, 47n52 Southern Symphonists Quintet, 39 Southern Syncopated Orchestra, 42, 44, 51n117, 89n30 space, linear extension of, 216 Spate, Virginia, 105, 112, 116, 117, 118, 125, 131–3 speech, 95–6 spiritualism, 64, 85 spirituality, 31, 164–7 spontaneity, 22, 82, 279 spontaneous creativity, 80–1 spontaneous expression, 80 Steefel, Lawrence, 237 Stein, Gertrude, 56 Stein, Leo, 56 Stein, Martin, 31 Stewart, Jeffrey, 267

305

Stieglitz, Alfred, 121, 122, 123, 135–6, 144, 165, 167, 180, 201–2, 203n15 stop-time improvisation, 71–2 straight jazz, 87 Stravinsky, Igor, Rite of Spring, 62 style, and ideology, 25 subconscious, the, 85 subjective experience, 112 Sudnow, David, 34 Sun Ra, 260 supplement, the, 33–4 surrealism, 85 Swift, Samuel, 123 swing, 96 Symbolism, 117–8, 149 synaesthesia, 73, 160 Synchronism, 188–9, 249 Syncopated Accompaniment (staccato) (Kupka), 77 syncopation, 96, 97 synethesis, 191 Synthesis (Kupka), 74 systems theory, 193 Szondi, Peter, 197 tempo, 180 temporality, 61, 105, 107–8, 113, 180, 195, 273–4 timbre, 4–5, 9, 43, 59 Tobey, Mark, 263 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, Le Cirque, 23 Tour de France, 1910, 228–9 trace, 17 tradition, 19, 76 translation, 174–7, 178, 179 translator, role of the, 174–5 Treemonisha (Joplin), 36 Trombetti, Alfredo, 83 Turpin, Tom, 37–8 Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Kandinsky), 164–7 Udnie; jeune fille américaine (danse) (Picabia), 131–6, 132 Uhde, Wilhelm, 56 unanisme, 64 unexpected, the, 282

306 unpredictably, 235 Untitled c. 1948 (Krasner), 253–4, 255, 256, 257 Vachtová, Ludmila, 82, 87 Valensi, Henry, 100 van Dongen, Kees, 56 Van Pragg, Joost, 4 Van Vechten, Carl, 225 Varèse, Edgar, workshop, 1957, 203n24 variability, 248 Verdier, Fabienne, 271, 271–2, 274, 275, 276–7, 278–82, 278, 280 Versatile Four, 51n110 Viardot, Louis, 147 Villon, Jacques, Le cake-walk des petites filles, 62–3, 63 visibility, and invisibility, 55–6 visual abstraction, and jazz, 54 visual language, 115–7 visual music, 191 voice, 32 Voilà Haviland (Picabia), 150, 151, 152 von Wiegand, Charmion, 257, 257–8 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 186 Waterman, G., 49n89

Index Werktreue, 174 Western classical tradition, 5 Whistler, James McNeill, 72 White Box, The (Duchamp), 160 Whiteman, Paul, 169, 176, 187, 207n90 Wiens, Edith, 279 Wilcock, Evelyn, 8 Wilhelm, Lucy, 108 Williams, Orlo, 187 Winn, Edward, 37 With Hidden Noise (Duchamp), 159 Witkin, Robert, 9 words, Duchamp and, 119–21, 238–9 Wright, Willard Huntington, 188–9, 190, 249 writing, 34 written music, 36–8, 51n118, 159–61 Xie He, 190, 192–3 Young, Jordan, 279, 281 Zarathustra, 54 Zen for Walking (Paik), 243, 244, 245 Žižek, Slavoj, 20

307

308