The aesthetics of Duke Ellington's suites: the case of Togo Brava.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research

One of the most controversial aspects of all the critiques of Ellington concerns the aesthetic value of his great works; from Creole Rhapsody onward, his suites have been the subject of a lively debate that ultimately addresses the very definition and nature of jazz. Seldom have Ellington's suites met with the approval of the critics, who have raised two mutually interdependent objection to them:

1. they betray the most authentic, profound nature of jazz;

2. they have no structural unity, no coherence of motive, and are weakened by the composer's inability to control large forms.

The first of these objections dates back to the early thirties, to the publication of Reminiscing in Tempo, which unleashed a violent debate (see Hammond 1935; Archetti 1936). To modern ears, that diatribe sounds outdated. We have since understood that the idea of jazz is subject to mutation, to continuous redefinition; it evolves with the transformations in the relationship that the musicians, the public, and the critics have always had with jazz music (DeVeaux 1991).

Unlike the first, however, the second objection--the one about structural unity--is still very widespread and is propounded by some very authoritative critics and scholars (a good example is the position adopted by Max Harrison [1964]). This objection is voiced against practically all of Ellington's suites (with the typical exception of Reminiscing in Tempo), essentially accusing the composer of being incapable of giving his longer works a real unity of theme, of not knowing how to manage the development of a motive, and of having composed--especially after the Second World War--suites that are no more than strings of separate pieces. These separate pieces, the argument continues, are held together not by any profound relationship between the pieces themselves but by criteria outside the music, at times explicitly descriptive, at other times abstract (such as literary dedications or dedications to a given country, continent, city, etc.).

Ultimately, Ellington is accused of being unable to master the techniques of composing for large forms, a weakness that only underscores the fact that he was not familiar with such composers as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schumann. However, it is a mistake to base an understanding and appreciation of Ellington's suites on the aesthetic criteria used to judge European classical music, especially European music of the classical-romantic period. The question of the success or failure of Ellington's larger compositions needs to be addressed from a completely different viewpoint.

Writing about vernacular music, Thomas Brothers (1997, 170) succinctly defined the role played by aural transmission and transcription: "Vernacular music may be written down at any time, for one purpose or another, and one genre or another may even give rise to tradition that is conceived and disseminated in writing. But, substantially, vernacular music evolves independently of notation." This is exactly how jazz has developed. It is music based on an aural tradition, it has evolved against an urban industrial background, and it has spread in no small part by means of "secondary aurality" (Ong 1982) such as the radio, the record, and the video.

Aural traditions have their own unique ways of transmitting knowledge, both on the level of how they work on their phrases and on formulas and the level of the overall form. (1) Because sound is not permanent, but fleeting and volatile, and writing is not the most important way in which it is transmitted, music and poetry based on aural tradition rely on our memory for their survival. In terms of content, the most effective way of fixing the information for posterity is by repetition, which leads to elaborations on the formula of the material. Because it is notoriously difficult to manage large forms in terms of memory alone, aural cultures are incapable of organizing forms constructed of organic relationships: forms that make use of developments and elaborate cross-references with internal transformations that refer both forward and backward within the composition. Instead, they produce additive forms, where episodes tacked on like modules create a simple linear sequence. This kind of macrostructure is used in the epics attributed to Homer and in traditional African genealogies: the poet learns a certain number of episodes by rote from his master, then gradually adds others on his own invention, which he in turn teaches to his apprentice. The natural limits of memorization inhibit the development of complex psychological and time relationships. This method of preservation is the difference between the hero of the epic and the characters of the nineteenth-century novel: on the one hand, the Homeric bards subjected Odysseus to one adventure after another without ever substantially altering his character; on the other, Dostoyevsky was able to create the complex character of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment because he was writing. He was thus able to control and elaborate on what he had created and to refer himself and his reader back to specific events that had taken place hundreds of pages earlier to explain new narrative and psychological consequences (see Ong 1982; Small 1987).

Something very similar happens in music. As Curt Sachs (1962) has shown, in music with aural tradition, large forms are often reduced to a collection of different episodes; frequently, the only thing that holds them together is their function, as with certain African funeral rites or a series of celebratory dances that are related to each other, as was the case at the court of Louis XIV in France. But when music is created and transmitted in written form, additive structures are less frequently found. The fugue and the sonata form, for example, are clearly the result of a control of form that is exercised on the written page, enabling motives to be extrapolated, elaborated, and distributed organically in the score and in structures that may be quite extensive.

In jazz, a music that is essentially based on an aural tradition, the forms are mainly additive. The clearest example of this is the chorus--a brief structure that is repeated in a virtually unlimited sequence of the same module. Extended forms also have additive structures; a suite is a series of separate pieces grouped as a single composition. From a purely formal viewpoint, jazz composers, inspired by African performance practices, tend to be less interested in the horizontal dimension (development) than in the vertical dimension of overlapping musical layers; we can find them in the simplified two dimensions of ragtime, the New Orleans polyphony that is divided into various levels of register, the overlapping riffs of the big bands in the swing era, the vertical structures of Afro-Cuban bop (Manteca), Charles Mingus's "rotary perception," George Russell's pyramids of ostinato, and Anthony Braxton's pulse tracks (Zenni, 1994a).

The main objection that is raised against Ellington's suites is that they have no formal unity. What is usually meant by formal unity is unity that is achieved by elaborating and developing motives organically. And yet many great masterpieces of Western classical music lack any organic formal unity, for instance, Johann Sebastian Bach's suites, Philippe de Vitry's medieval motets, John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, and Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony. In fact, the concept of "formal unity" is not rigidly defined. It is historically determined and changes profoundly from place to place and over time. The development in the classical and romantic sense--as in the sonata form--is a typical tool used to attain unity, but it is only one of many possibilities and cannot be considered the sole method of formal unity. Yet jazz critics have based their evaluations of the efforts of composers like Ellington exclusively on this criterion, removing it from its historical context and raising it to the level of a universal yardstick of analysis and evaluation. Anxious to demonstrate that jazz is as valid a form of music as European classical music, critics mistakenly transpose Ellington and Mingus onto the terrain of Mozart and Beethoven, subjecting them to the criteria of composition of the most popular classical and romantic masterpieces. Such misguided analysis also demonstrates a paucity of familiarity with other techniques and aesthetics of composition. (2)

For a correct approach to the question of large forms in jazz and in African-American music in general, we have to use other methodological tools that we can glean from the study of structures in aural music and poetry. The first question we have to answer has to do with the validity of the suite as a musical construct. There is no justification for accusing Such Sweet Thunder of being short on unity when there are various classical forms made up of several movements whose unity is achieved in ways that have precious little to do with the development of motives. To illustrate this point, an examination of two Western classical music forms, the suite of dances and the symphony, follows.

The Baroque suite of dances consists of a series of independent dances grouped together by specific criteria. A suite usually begins with an allemande, a double-time dance at a medium to fast tempo, followed by a courante in triple time at a medium rhythm, a sarabande, again in triple time but much slower, and a gigue, a very fast conclusion in a compound time. Between the sarabande and the gigue, the composer usually inserted as many other dances as he liked, in double or triple time and generally at a medium tempo. All the dances are bipartite and in the same tonality; moreover, we...

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