Riffing the Canon

Riffing the CanonAuthor(s): David SchiffSource: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Dec., 2007), pp. 216-222Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30163079 .

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RIFFING THE CANON BY DAVID SCHIFF

When I was invited to speak about musical canons to the Music Library Association (MLA) and the Society for American Music (SAM) during their joint conference in Pittsburgh in February 2007, my first instinct was to race for the nearest exit. As you will soon see, I have an anticanon- ical bias that is more the result of my peculiar educational history than

any theoretical considerations. So my talk will be anecdotal and experi- ential. I shall start with a couple of examples of canonic trauma from my earlier years, and then turn to the evolution of my views of what is often considered a jazz canon, the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.'

Discussions and critiques of the musical canon, its history, and its influence are pretty commonplace these days, but I think that feW people younger than I would ever have collided with canonical thinking the way I did back in the fall of 1967. Columbia University had awarded me a fel-

lowship to study at the University of Cambridge to continue my under-

graduate studies as an English major. I had been told that one of the nice things about studying at Cambridge was that instead of taking courses, you met with a tutor (the actual term is supervisor), and you could study anything you liked. In reality the system was not as free-form as that; the supervisor had to agree on the direction of your studies, but in principle there was a lot of room for self-direction. I fantasized a year dedicated to the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Virginia Woolf.

But no one had warned me that literary study at Cambridge was under the sway of Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978), the editor of the

English journal Scrutiny, or that many of the supervisors were Leavisites, a term I had never heard before. Leavis was a canon maker. Indeed, after Matthew Arnold he was the mother of all canon makers. In his 1948

book, The Great Tradition2 (mercilessly parodied in Tom Sharpe's novel, The Great Pursuit) ,3 Leavis cut the broad and diverse field of the English

David Schiff is professor of music at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. 1. The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, selected and annotated by Martin Williams, Division of the

Performing Arts of the Smithsonian Institution P6 11891 (1973), 6 LPs; rev. ed., Smithsonian Collection of Recordings RD 033 (1987), 5 CD

2. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1948). 3. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

216



Riffing the Canon 217

novel down to a handful of authors and a rigorously, fanatically win- nowed list of their books. (If this approach sounds familiar, it may be because The Great Tradition served as a model for Joseph Kerman's Opera as

Drama.4) Leavis had famously remarked that life was not long enough to read

Fielding (so much for Tom Jones). And Dickens, it turned out, had only written one book worth reading: Hard Times (an odd choice if you ask

me). A few authors--George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad--had

actually succeeded in producing more than a single book that met Leavis's exalted standards--though rarely more than three out of their considerable output. I'm not making this up. One evening I saw the

great man himself give a lecture--his face had a scowl of chronic irri-

tability that he wore like a distinguished-service medal. It was a big event: the first time Frank Leavis ever lectured about W. B. Yeats. The hall was

packed and Leavis did not let us down; over an intense hour and a half he made the case that the allegedly great Irish poet had only written one

poem worth reading, or as he kept saying, that you could walk around, that stood up (the poem was "Among School Children").

On another occasion one of Leavis's disciples, a brilliant young don, gave a talk on Fellini's movie 8 1/2. You will be happy to know that he

thought it was worth watching, but it is almost impossible for me to describe the earnestness, the pain, the visible writhings of his moral and in- tellectual conscience (this was the approved Leavisite style of operation) with which he made the case for what was after all just a movie, but one which he painstakingly placed in an intermedia, interdisciplinary sum- mum bonum, summa cum laude canon-to-end-all-canons trinity of ulti- mate greatness along with Plato's Symposium and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.

By the way, when I proposed a year-long study of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Woolf (hardly a controversial list, you might think), my supervisor informed me that Dostoevsky was, as he saw it, too psychologi- cal, that the French never really wrote novels, and that I needed to read

George Eliot--all of it. He did not even acknowledge my mention of

Virginia Woolf, who was, for Leavisites, the devil incarnate. It was at that

point that I decided to switch my Cambridge studies from literature to music.

In retrospect I can see how Leavis's exclusive little canon could have had such an influence. Like other canon builders, Leavis began with ex-

travagant praise for a genre. The novel, "the one bright book of life" as Leavis's hero D. H. Lawrence had called it (in his essay "Why the Novel Matters"), had a unique moral function that seemed to combine and

4. New York: Knopf, 1956; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.



218 NOTES, December 2007

transcend the previous efforts of philosophy, religion, and even poetry. The novel was the royal road to "maturity" (as the Leavisites termed their secular notion of salvation). In short, The Novel was the Bible. Given such exalted expectations of the form itself, examples of the genre that failed to deliver the moral goods were beneath contempt, they were acts of betrayal, of moral treason. They were false gospels and golden calves--and so, as the saying went, not worth reading. For Leavis, as with

many other canon makers, the good was the enemy of the very good, the

very good the enemy of the excellent, and the merely excellent the

enemy of anything that was truly worth your time.

Perhaps the ideological struggles of the post-World War II era favored the rise of critical Cromwells. Even before I went to college I had read a book about twentieth-century music that followed a similar strategy: Andre Hodeir's Since Debussy.5 Hodeir cut the music of the first half of the century down to five composers: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and BartOk. But so scrupulous and demanding was his sense of what modern music really was about, that he took even these five mod- ernist idols to task for failing to reach the heights except in one or two works. (Hodeir's book is now forgotten, but its ideas are familiar, because they were mostly lifted from Pierre Boulez, who went on to build a

conducting career around this very canon.) Hodeir dismissed Ives, Britten, and Shostakovich with the merest shrug--Ives, like Satie, he said, was just a tiresome myth but then again he could not even say anything nice about Ravel. Interestingly, Hodeir was a noted jazz critic; his most famous and frequently anthologized essay conferred masterpiece status on Ellington's "Concerto for Cootie" in a style of pained, self- conscious moral exercise worthy of Leavis--or perhaps even of Moliere's Tartuffe.6

Canons often seduce us, as those of Leavis and Hodeir did, because of their very earnestness and because the works that achieve canonical status are good ones. Middlemarch is a great novel. "Among School Children" is a great poem. "Concerto for Cootie" is a great piece. This

guy must know his stuff--and think of the time he is saving us. About twenty years ago I began to teach a course in the history of

jazz--I have taught some version of it every other year since. As with other curricular choices I have made, I decided to teach the class as an excuse to learn more about the subject. I had been listening to jazz since

my childhood, played piano and bass in a band, had already worn out at least five copies of Kind of Blue, and, when I was in college, often went to

5. Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music (New York: Grove Press, 1961). 6. Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956).




hear club performances by my two favorites: Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. But the jazz I listened to was contemporary jazz; I had little sense of jazz history beyond my mother's memories of thrilling to

Benny Goodman as a bobby-soxer--a disincentive to pursue the subject. I first caught a glimpse of jazz history during my years in England. The

august BBC Third Programme featured jazz on Saturday afternoons, but instead of playing the latest Miles, Mingus, Monk, the MJQ, Art Blakey, or Horace Silver, they played vintage Armstrong, Ellington, and Basie.

My sense of the relation between these two different musical repertories was inchoate--a situation I hoped to fix in the classroom. When I looked for a textbook, however, my heart sank. The most popular ones de- scribed jazz history as a generic succession from, as they called them, Dixieland to Swing to Modern Jazz, and the musical examples (probably for copyright reasons) were often heavy-handed pastiches of these al-

leged styles composed by the authors. But while there was no textbook, there was, finally, a set of recordings that could take the place of a book: the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (SCCJ), which first appeared on LP in 1973.

The SCCJ has been revised several times since it first appeared, but the edition I first used was an album of six LPs containing about five hours of musical selections arranged pretty much chronologically from Scott

Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," recorded in 1916, to John Coltrane's "Ala- bama" of 1963. I am not going to rehearse the theoretical issues of jazz history analyzed in Scott DeVeaux's classic essay "Constructing the Jazz Tradition";7 instead I want to describe briefly my evolving view of the SCCJ as a teaching tool. The great thing about the SCCJ, the thing that made you get down on your knees in appreciation, was that it made the

jazz tradition accessible and portable. Before its appearance, jazz knowl-

edge seemed to be determined by the size of one's record collection; jazz history and criticism was dominated by highly opinionated discophiles. When I read jazz criticism and found references to great performances from 1935 or 1938, I did not know where to find them; now they were all in one box. Indeed, the quality of the music on the SCCJwas dizzying-- like eating a twelve-course banquet of caviar, or coming upon a moun- tain of Holy Grails. With almost no effort you could listen to the greatest of the great, like "West End Blues," recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five in 1928 with Earl Hines on piano. With a resource like this

(ably abetted by Martin Williams's fine liner notes), my jazz history course seemed to teach itself.

7. Scott DeVeaux, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography," Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 525-60.




So what was wrong? I gradually began to find pedagogical problems in using the SCCJ. And gradually I could see how, wonderful as it was, it was a result of the same cultural disposition that had produced the books by Leavis and Hodeir.

The first problem was chronology. I often teach courses in reverse time-order so that students first encounter familiar objects with which they are comfortable. Beginning jazz history at the beginning, say with "Dippermouth Blues" recorded by King Oliver in 1923 (the earliest in- strumental on the SCCJ), means listening to an unfamiliar and complex idiom through the dense fog of primitive recording technology. (Of course there was nothing to stop me from assigning listenings from the SCCJ in reverse order, although this was less convenient on LPs than it is today on CDs.) But chronology created bigger problems: it conveyed an impression of cause and effect, a series of begats which were also the litany of many jazz critics. Oliver begat Armstrong begat Eldridge begat Gillespie. Music begat music and all this begetting seemed to occur within a tight little family of jazz greats, carefully cordoned off from any other kinds of music.

Over the years I, and many other people, could see the conscious and unconscious prejudices of the SCCJ: Martin Williams clearly privileged contemporary critical opinion over popular appeal. As he wrote in the liner notes: "In any case it no longer seems very useful to use the term jazz quite as loosely and as casually as was once done, and in particular not in view of the way the music has succeeded in retaining its identity and has developed since its beginnings. . . ." Changes in our other popular musics sometimes seem to be matters of caprice or fashion. Jazz, on the other hand, has evolved and developed; its players had learned from, and built on, the music's past, somewhat in the manner we associate with "art music." Williams's notes also noted that, "as Stanley Dance has put it, the best jazz musicians have always been ahead of their audiences."

Perhaps less consciously, the SCCJ also was guilty of sexism (the only women featured were singers) and ageism (no Armstrong tracks after 1933, no Basie after 1939, no Ellington after 1944). But the most insidi- ous problem with the collection was its very excellence. Reducing jazz history to an unbroken series of dazzling high points, the SCCJ took the

lumps and bumps and uncertainties out of jazz history--a field marked almost from the beginning with passionate disputes between its follow- ers, all now neatly resolved and forgotten.

I was delighted, therefore, when the Smithsonian began to bring out further collections of a decidedly more personal and quirky nature, such at Bill Kirchner's revelatory five-CD Big Band Renaissance in 1995, and




Robert O'Meally's wide-ranging five-CD The Jazz Singers in 1998.8 The first track on the O'Meally set was totally unexpected and, as they say, paradigm-shifting: "West End Blues" sung by Eva Taylor with pianist Clarence Williams, recorded in 1929. Who knew that the song had lyrics? Who knew the original melody? Who was Eva Taylor? O'Meally was open- ing the windows of the jazz tradition, and breaking down the walls. While the Taylor recording might be termed a provocative curio, O'Meally's thoroughgoing attempt to undermine the view of jazz as a series of

closely related masterpieces in a very narrowly-defined idiom, became clear in his further inclusions: Mahalia Jackson, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Waters, Frank Sinatra--all persona non grata on the SCCJ--and most

daringly of all, I would say, Marvin Gaye singing "What's Going On." Was that jazz? It would be hard to think of an example better suited to pro- voking a class discussion.

How did this change my teaching? These postcanonical collections showed that the chosen few masterpieces of the SCCJ could be seen as

part of many different traditions and lines of development. Instead of

thinking about jazz performers and performances only in relation to one another, it seemed essential now to situate them in relation to other traditions of African American music, American popular music, European concert music, and non-European cultures, for not only was the music we called jazz in touch with all these traditions, but one of its defining strengths was the way it could absorb and rework music from many different and often distant sources.

In recent years two technological developments have changed my teaching even further. First, of course, is the Internet, which has turned the whole world into one enormous, if chaotic, library. Any kind of music is just a Google away. Second is the appearance on CD of older recordings, going back almost to the moment when Edison recorded sound, and, as Ira Gershwin put it, they all laughed. It is easy now to hear a wealth of jazz-related music going back as far as 1891, using the two-CD set that accompanies Tim Brooks's book Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919.9 An illuminating example might be the recording of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" recorded in 1912 by the

Apollo Jubilee Quartet (about whom, apparently, little is known beyond two recording credits). The song, of course, is familiar, but the timbre of the four voices forecasts the sound of a Swing Era sax section.

8. Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra: The 1940s and Beyond, Smithsonian Institution RD 108 (1995); The Jazz Singers: A Smithsonian Collection of Jazz Vocals from 1919-1994, Smithsonian Collection of Recordings/Sony Music Special Products RD 113 (1998).

9. Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).




In conclusion: education is not about basic libraries or minimum liter-

acy. If we have to have canons, or listening lists, then the more the better, the quirkier and more idiosyncratic and more parochial and even more

annoying the better, the further from the accepted wisdom of the field the better.

FIGURE 2,-b.



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Riffing the Canon