Book Reviews 127 ters approach the titular concepts of John Cage’s “chance operations” (p. 97; improvisation and social aesthetics to vary- a precompositional tool) rather than ing degrees, and sometimes not at all. his “indeterminacy” (postcompositional Neither of two articles on big-band jazz performer choice), the concept that investigates improvisation. The first, Cage favored after 1951. And Nicholas David Brackett’s “The Social Aesthetic Cook, in “Scripting Social Interaction,” of Swing in the 1940s,” contains a long a fight against the “negative mytholo- apologia entitled “What’s Improvisation gization of WAM” (p. 60), seems to be Got to Do with It?” (pp. 116–20), to completely unaware that Bailey in- which the reader might answer, “Not cluded an entire section on baroque much.” The second, Lisa Barg’s “Stray- extemporization and more modern horn’s Queer Arrangements,” a really classical organ improvisation in useful explication of gender and race Improvisa tion: Its Nature and Practice in through the collaboration of Rosemary Music. Cook proposes that an approach Clooney and Duke Ellington’s arranger like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Billy Strayhorn on the album Blue Rose Theory might “readily transfer to the (1956), is perhaps the most engaging analysis of graphic scores” (p. 69) but article of the book, but its focus is the ignores the extensive body of literature musical technique of arrangement, not on the interpretation and analysis of improvisation. indeterminate music in graphic and The writers and editors have, for the text scores since 1961. This body of most part, avoided the “normal” topics work has done much to elucidate the of post-1960s improvisation, particu- psychology, linguistics, and social activ- larly African-American free jazz (and ity that occur between the fixed score its successors) and British free improvi- and its interpretation in performance. sation. Only Born mentions the leg- Lacking all of this background support endary London group AMM and the and context, Cook’s chapter is the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG), a book’s weakest. much underrated, late-1970s ensemble In spite of these flaws, Improvisation of which Born was a member. Aside and Social Aesthetics is a substantial addi- from Eric Lewis’s work on AACM, very tion to the literature on improvisation. little of this era of African-American im- The breadth of the anthology makes it provisation appears in this volume. particularly useful not only to critical There is also little or no reference to theorists and improvisers but also to the large body of theory and philoso- students of big-band jazz, cinema, phy of indeterminacy, the theoretical dance, and theater. Although this book partner of post-1960 free improvisation. is by no means a central text on impro- In fact, the term indeterminacy seems visation as a social act, it will provide a to be missing altogether. This lack of good source of information for a num- context is particularly unfortunate in ber of subject areas and disciplines in the few places that encounter experi- any university. mental music and free improvisation. Virginia Anderson George E. Lewis erroneously mentions Experimental Music Catalogue

POPULAR MUSIC The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music. Edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse. (Tracking Pop.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. [xx, 360 p. ISBN 978047213067 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780472123513 (e-book), $64.95.] Music examples, pho- tographs, tables, index. 128 Notes, September 2019

“Good artists borrow; great artists hope that readers will pick up on this steal.” Variations of this aphorism have reference and infer meaning from it. A been attributed to luminaries from a parallel situation is easy to imagine for variety of fields, including T. S. Eliot music if we take the “text” to be a musi- (poetry), Pablo Picasso (visual arts), cal work. And analogous instances of Igor Stravinsky (music), and William quotation or parody, for example, are Faulkner (fiction). Not only does this common throughout the history of mu- quote imply that a fundamental aspect sic, as J. Peter Burkholder expertly of creating art involves appropriation sketches out in the book’s foreword. from previous works, it also implies that But the danger in each additional level the success of artists (and their work) is of abstraction is that the term’s initially strongly related to the skill of this ap- solid meaning becomes further and fur- propriation. To fully assess and under- ther watered down, such that it is ulti- stand any work of art, therefore, we mately rendered rather meaningless. In presumably need to identify and evalu- his essay on different cover versions of ate the ways in which it takes from Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” for the old and makes it new. This guiding example, Allan Moore takes the perfor- principle underpins The Pop Palimpsest, mance to be a text; Simon Zagorski- an interdisciplinary collection of twelve Thomas, in his essay on the relation- essays that investigates “intertextual” re- ship between electronic and acoustic lationships within recorded popular sounds, takes timbre to be a text; in the music. According to the book’s editors, essay by Serge Lacasse and Andy this is the first essay collection to con- Bennett on mix tapes, the selection and sider the full range of intertextuality in sequence of songs in a compilation is a popular music, with previous publica- text; for Stan Hawkins, who focuses on tions covering only a narrow slice of the music video for the Eurythmics the broader topic (p. 2). Indeed, what song “I Need a Man,” Marilyn Monroe’s binds the essays in this volume together persona is a text. In this loosened is a very wide and all-inclusive interpre- sense, intertextuality no longer con- tation of intertextuality. This expanded cerns simply one song referring to framework may be one of the book’s another. Rather, it allows for some strengths in that it spurs readers to generic aspect of a song (or songs) to think about various types of relation- evoke some vague category of style, ships between musical and nonmusical recording technique, cultural iconogra- texts that they had perhaps not previ- phy, or whatever else. From Fiol-Matta’s ously considered. But it may also be collective perspective, this is the power one of the book’s weaknesses, because of intertextuality: to expose and inter- it seems to allow for almost anything to pret threads from the vast web of possi- be considered intertextual, thereby ne- ble connections. But that description glecting some of the more overt issues could essentially be taken as a synonym that arise given a more prototypical for music analysis itself. With intertex- understanding of the term. tuality defined so generically, in other Admittedly, the discussion of inter- words, it does not seem clear what the textuality in music requires an element difference is between simply analyzing of metaphor. In its central meaning, in- music and analyzing music from an tertextuality refers to a specific set of intertextual perspective. After all, if literary devices—including allusion, music—as the quote above suggests— quotation, pastiche, and parody— has always been about borrowing, has whereby one work of literature is refer- not music analysis always been about enced in another, typically with the unpacking it? Book Reviews 129

To be fair, each essay in the collec- This preoccupation with casting in- tion provides interesting insights into tertextuality as a sweeping intellectual aspects of one or more musical works. model is most conspicuous in the But the discussion often seems unnec- book’s first chapter, by Lacasse. essarily bogged down by having to be Building on the work of literary theorist couched in terms of a reworked con- Gérard Genette, Lacasse lays out his ceptual framework of intertextuality de- framework for “transphonography” (p. spite the availability of more straightfor- 9), in which he attempts to categorize ward, equally effective methods. In his all the possible ways that recordings chapter on dialogic intertextuality, for of popular music might be linked. His example, William Echard posits that system quickly becomes needlessly the mercurial stylistic diversity of Neil jargon-heavy, though. For example, he Young’s career can be seen as a balanc- rebrands recordings of a song as ing act between the conflicting pres- “phonograms” (p. 11), a change in mu- sures of gaining credibility within the sical meter as “transmetrification” rock tradition while also establishing an (p. 19), the act of quotation as “inter- individualistic voice. Echard’s essay is phonography” (p. 26), and editing and strongest when he is citing criticism remixing as “quantitative transforma- contemporary with the changes in tions” (p. 22). The desire to create a co- Young’s style, showing a pattern of re- hesive system is understandable, but sponse that initially involves disap- at what cost? I worry that the primary proval but is then followed by retro- function of Lacasse’s taxonomy is to spective reevaluation. This is solid make an analysis sound more academic scholarship, but there is nothing about rather than to clearly communicate it that demands the concept of intertex- ideas between people. This concern be- tuality. Notably, the term intertextual (or comes manifest in the following chap- any of its variants) is used only a few ter by Roger Castonguay, who applies times once the chapter finally moves— “Genettean hypertextuality” (p. 61) to around page 179, more than halfway the music of Genesis. The core of through—to the discussion of Young’s Castonguay’s discussion comprises an music and its reception. The utility of analysis of “Los Endos” (the last track devoting a hefty portion of the chapter on A Trick of the Tail), outlining how to unraveling ideas about intertextual- this song reuses and transforms earlier ity by Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin, material from the album and a B-side Theodore Gracyk, and others in order entitled “It’s Yourself.” The nuts and to formalize musical style as a text is bolts of the analysis read like standard questionable, as it distracts from and music theory, and thus it seems circum- delays the musical observations that the spect that “Genette’s hypertextual tax- chapter has to offer. Perhaps what is onomy has made it possible to turn the most lamentable is that by spilling so organicists’ goal on its head by uncov- much ink on nuanced definitions of in- ering a hidden diversity within the tertextuality, Echard misses the opportu- unity of the musical surface” (p. 75), nity to engage with the many cases of since one can easily envision existing more obvious intertextuality involving analytical techniques achieving that Young’s work, such as his resetting of same basic goal. Don Gibson’s lyrics in “Oh Lonesome Not all of the book’s chapters are so Me,” his appropriation of a Rolling excessively burdened by overtheoriza- Stones melody in “Borrowed Tune,” or tion. The essay by Mark Spicer, for ex- Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to his song ample, which traces the influence of “Alabama.” the Beatles on the music of the Electric 130 Notes, September 2019

Light Orchestra, takes a similar stance trum of approaches to intertextuality in as Echard’s essay on Young. Specifi- recorded popular music, the book of- cally, Spicer highlights the balance that fers a kaleidoscopic if somewhat motley ELO had to strike in order to establish assortment of readings. If anything, the themselves as successors to the Beatles collection presents a model for how without being perceived as unduly de- to take practically any topic in music rivative. As a context for his argument, analysis and turn it into a paper on in- Spicer invokes Harold Bloom’s “anxiety tertextuality. This desire to make things of influence” (The Anxiety of Influence: A fit under the rubric of the book’s title is Theory of Poetry [New York: Oxford perhaps best symbolized by the inclu- University Press, 1973]), but he spends sion of the essay by Mary S. Woodside, the bulk of his chapter leading the which in all fairness is a well-researched reader through a rich array of music work of music scholarship. But what is a examples and commentary. Similarly, chapter on nineteenth-century French Justin A. Williams uses the Game’s “We vaudeville doing in a book ostensibly Ain’t” and Kendrick Lamar’s “m.A.A.d. about recorded popular music? City” as case studies to show how rap Trevor de Clercq artists construct their position within Middle Tennessee State University the lineage of previous artists through the use of sampling, quotation, and Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975– other methods. He supports his argu- 1984. By Mervyn Cooke. (Oxford ment with ample evidence and exam- Studies in Recorded Jazz.) New York: ples, including detailed tables of lyrical Oxford University Press, 2017. [xxii, references and flow. When Williams en- 298 p. ISBN 9780199897674 (hard- gages with theories of intertextuality, cover), $74; ISBN 9780199897667 he does so in a cogent and pithy way (paperback), $18.95; ISBN that enlightens rather than clouds the 9780199897670 (e-book), $9.99.] points he is trying to make. Given its Music examples, illustrations, discogra- widespread use of sampling, hip-hop phy and filmography, index. music seems like an especially fertile style in which to investigate intertextu- Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975– ality, so an accompanying essay on rap 1984 traces the development of by Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods is a Metheny’s style as a guitarist, impro- welcome addition. Burns and Woods viser, and composer during the forma- propose a similar thesis to Williams’s, tive part of his career. Examining the arguing that Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye eleven albums he created on the ECM West (like the Game and Kendrick label during a span of eight years Lamar) construct their place in the his- (1976–84), this study presents an en- tory of hip-hop through the use of in- grossing assessment of Metheny’s style, tertextual play. The book could proba- development, and philosophy on jazz. bly have benefited from at least one Cooke sets out to explore three main more chapter on rap, though, consider- concepts: “the fundamental notion of a ing how endemic intertextuality is to ‘new paradigm’ capable of keeping jazz the style and what a large chunk of the relevant”; the “increasing symbiotic re- popular music landscape hip-hop/rap lationship between improvisation and music now occupies. composition”; and finally, “the various Generally speaking, the collection is strategies through which a linear model like many others: the appeal of any in- for musical narrative was constantly dividual essay will hinge strongly on the varied” (p. 26). academic interests of the reader. For Cooke provides context for how those wishing to engage with a spec- Metheny’s music fits in the community