Ever since I started reading Understanding Media, I've been asking myself "What would Marshall McLuhan say?" about pretty much everything.
For instance: there are a disproportionate number of Asians who swing dance. WHAT WOULD MCLUHAN SAY?!
I'm not really sure, but it might well involve the Eastern nonlineal intuition of that which is funky. Jazz, according to McLuhan, represents an end to the Western "homogeneous and repetitive rhythms." Here's another choice quote:
"Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music."
Further, swing dancers participate in "syncopation and symbolist discontinuity that, like relativity and quantum physics, heralded in the end of the Gutenburg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and organization."
Subvert Gutenburg, and slap that bass! Really, I have no idea what McLuhan is talking about half the time, but I know that I like it.
3 Comments:
I am not sure McCluhan knew what he was talking about all the time, either. For instance, he seems to be buying into the late 19th century understanding of music, one that assumed that it was always the way of Western music, sicut erat in principio, etc. This led to such balderdash as the various assumptions of functional tonality based on equal-12 tuning, or the rigid understanding of rhythm and ornament in the baroque.
I have come to the conclusion that Bach, for instance, swung more than most harpsichordists play him. Also, improvisation was the rule, not the exception, until rather late. Chopin and Lizst, for instance, used to get together for improvised jam sessions. The baroque figured bass is very similar to using a jazz fake book.
So, I am not at all willing to accept the notion of jazz being all that radical a change to Western music. If anything, the heavy-handed, brain-dead crap of people like Brahms, Elgar, and Holst is the radical break with the continuity of Western Music. Jazz just dug back to the glorious Baroque, when music was music and men were men.
Makes sense. However, does Baroque music really invite audience participation in the way McLuhan says jazz does? You don't tend to find people jumping around to Handel and co.
First, yes, ESPECIALLY Handel's operas, which were rather racous affairs with hired claques trying to outdo each other to bring attention to their singer. Music had to be a less passive activity because the only way to have it around was to make it, so you had a more musically inclined audience. Also, the baroque was designed specifically to envelop the audience in the spectacle. Think of attending Mass at St. Mark's in Venice when Monteverdi was in charge of music there: two choirs in different lofts exchanging phrases in an early type of stereo, pipe organ exchanging lines in a similar way with remote brass sections, gold vestments, gold mosaics, thick incense, etc.
The fervor of the baroque audience rivaled even the rock and roll fan. Frescobaldi (who, if you happen to be in Rome, is buried in the Church of the Twelve Apostles, also the resting place of the Conventual Franciscan Pope who suppressed the Jesuits - always worth a pilgrimage) played a concert in St. Peter's Square that attracted 20,000! 20K to hear unamplified harpsichord. This is like the thousands of teenagers swooning to the Beatles at Candlestick Park (where you could not hear a thing unless you were right up close).
Now, I am also going to ask if we are going to discuss jazz and dancing to it: what kind of jazz are we talking about? There is a difference between the Benny Goodman Orchestra swinging away at an all night ball and the Modern Jazz Quartet playing a concert hall.
Post a Comment
<< Home