Who wrote Duke Ellington’s music? Authorship and collective creativity in ‘Mood Indigo’

The copyright system privileges composition over performance, particularly improvisation, and melody over harmony. Both of these evaluations are problematic in the field of popular music, which is often the result of collaborative processes involving improvisation, and where harmonic structures may be of greater importance than recognisable tunes. In this chapter, I will illuminate the creative process of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Often regarded as, variously, America’s or the Twentieth Century’s ‘greatest composer’, Ellington arguably comes closest to a traditional authorial figure in jazz. Nevertheless, the majority of his most famous creations are the result of often complex collaborative processes. Using ‘Mood Indigo’ as a case study, I will reconstruct the creative contributions of various individuals in detail, evaluating their originality and significance for the final result. As I will show, although he was by no means the sole creator of the song, Ellington did take most of the fundamental creative decisions and, as bandleader, lent the tune a ‘brand identity’

Miles ahead: a film that remains (mostly) true to jazz legend Miles Davis

No abstract available

Music, performance, theatre: Christopher Fox's stage works

No abstract available

Prospero's death: modernism, anti-humanism and Un re in ascolto

In his own comments, Luciano Berio has consistently rejected the term ‘opera’ for his Un re in ascolto (‘A King, listening’, 1979-84), instead insisting on calling it a ‘musical action’ (azione musicale). This dismissal of opera as a genre contrasts with most other commentators’ views, according to which the work represents the closest engagement with the conventions and traditions of opera in Berio’s oeuvre. In this chapter, I discuss the reasons behind and sources for Berio’s negative appraisal of opera and proceed to analyse the work’s musical dramaturgy on that basis, focussing particularly on the palimpsest of texts, by Shakespeare, W. H. Auden and Italo Calvino among others, that the composer employed. My conclusion is that, despite Berio’s criticism of the genre, Un re derives its fascination and attraction from the pleasures of formalised spectacle that opera uniquely provides. While the work and Berio’s stance are thus somewhat contradictory, this may in itself be characteristic of the aporias of a genre that has become inherently problematic. If the work represents one of the most substantial and successful attempts at reinvigorating opera, this is therefore arguably because of, not despite of, its critical interrogation of the genre

Play it again, Duke: jazz performance, improvisation, and the construction of spontaneity

No abstract available

Erik Bergman, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of musical geography

Modernism is haunted by its disavowal of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the location of culture’. Making a dogma out of the universalism of the Enlightenment, it has largely denied cultural difference. However, as theorists, such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, have pointed out, modernism can itself be seen as a product of colonialism and imperialism with which it is largely coterminous. This is perceptible notably in the cultural geography of centre and periphery which is one of modernism’s hallmarks. Witness for instance how Theodor W. Adorno, in his Philosophy of New Music, is so troubled by music from ‘the periphery’ – that of Janáček and Bartók – that he posits an essential asynchronicity, whereby this music represents a different stage of development. This transformation of space into time, which is characteristic of the cultural geography of musical modernism, relates closely to the ‘time lag’ between metropolis and colony that Bhabha decries as an essential feature of colonialism. Since it is a largely hidden aspect, the cultural geography of musical modernism and the transformations it underwent from modernism’s inception during the hey-day of imperialism to its late, ‘post-colonialist’ phase is rarely discussed. While it is beyond the scope of this contribution to study the totality of the intricate intersections between musical modernism and cultural geography, I will illustrate some aspects with the work of a composer who was both subject to and continuously sought to evade the dynamics of centre and periphery, the Finland-Swede Erik Bergman (1911-2006). Coming from the periphery of musical modernism, Bergman was unusual in rejecting romantic nationalism, associating himself instead with the international avant-garde. However, he quickly contrasted this form of universalist internationalism with a deep interest in and compositional engagement with non-Western music, long before the American and European avant-gardes discovered ‘the orient’. This form of ‘globalism’ is in turn complemented by Bergman’s rediscovery of the local, the sounds and musical cultures of his native environment. In so doing, Bergman is however not interested in the self-exoticising characteristic of nationalism, but in uncovering the strangeness within the self. In my contribution, I will seek to relate Bergman’s compositional choices both to its various historical contexts and to recent discourses in the social sciences and humanities, notably the critical reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism currently undertaken

Supplement to the Music of Mauricio Kagel

This freely accessible electronic publication acts as a complement to my earlier _The Music of Mauricio Kagel_ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and discusses Kagel's career and early works in Argentina as well as the late work, composed after work on the book was completed. It also includes an updated and complete (as far as can be established) catalogue of works

Globalisierung

No abstract available

Who wrote Duke Ellington’s music? Authorship and collective creativity in ‘Mood Indigo’

The copyright system privileges composition over performance, particularly improvisation, and melody over harmony. Both of these evaluations are problematic in the field of popular music, which is often the result of collaborative processes involving improvisation, and where harmonic structures may be of greater importance than recognisable tunes. In this chapter, I will illuminate the creative process of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Often regarded as, variously, America’s or the Twentieth Century’s ‘greatest composer’, Ellington arguably comes closest to a traditional authorial figure in jazz. Nevertheless, the majority of his most famous creations are the result of often complex collaborative processes. Using ‘Mood Indigo’ as a case study, I will reconstruct the creative contributions of various individuals in detail, evaluating their originality and significance for the final result. As I will show, although he was by no means the sole creator of the song, Ellington did take most of the fundamental creative decisions and, as bandleader, lent the tune a ‘brand identity’

Supplement to the Music of Mauricio Kagel

This freely accessible electronic publication acts as a complement to my earlier _The Music of Mauricio Kagel_ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and discusses Kagel's career and early works in Argentina as well as the late work, composed after work on the book was completed. It also includes an updated and complete (as far as can be established) catalogue of works