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 Improvi sa 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