Music and the Modes of Production: Three Moments in American Jazz by Karim Wissa Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Fredric Jameson, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Brothers ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 ABSTRACT Music and the Modes of Production: Three Moments in American Jazz by Karim Wissa Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Fredric Jameson, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Brothers ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Karim Wissa 2018 Abstract What ideological dreams does music express? And how does it do so? In listening to three paradigmatic moments in American Jazz, this dissertation attempts to answer these two problems by illustrating how the modes of our production structure the range of our interpretive possibilities, and how music responds to and overcomes these dilemmas aesthetically. iv Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Musical Dreams and the Modes of Production ...................... 1 Jazz Historiography in Brief .......................................................................................... 28 Common Solutions to the Problems of Jazz History Today ................................ 35 Chapter One: West End Blues and the Problems of Modernity ................. 43 The Form of the Content: Twelve-Bar Blues ............................................................ 43 The Content of the Form: Cyclical Variety ................................................................ 53 The Masses and the Great Migration: Imperialism ............................................... 56 “West End Blues”: Modern and Victorian .................................................................. 65 Ideologies of the Masses Revisited .............................................................................. 67 Chapter Two: Black, Brown, Beige in the Age of the Culture Industry ... 77 Black, Brown, and Beige .................................................................................................. 77 A Brief on Music and Narrative ..................................................................................... 78 Black ....................................................................................................................................... 84 The Stagnancy of Swing and the Culture Industry: Aesthetic Reactions ....... 97 An Opening in the Field: ASCAP & BMI ..................................................................... 103 The Aesthetics of Standardization: Space over Time ......................................... 106 Rationalization of Class Interests: Rent versus Wage ........................................ 110 Redux: Black, Brown, and Beige ................................................................................. 113 Chapter Three: Post-Bop and the Encroaching Marketplace ................. 116 v Bebop ................................................................................................................................... 122 “Ko-Ko” (1945) ................................................................................................................. 125 Post-War Changes in the Function of Jazz in the Culture Industry ................ 134 Self-Expression, or the Internalization of a Profit Logic? .................................. 139 Variability and Fugitivity: “So What” (1959) .................................................... 142 The Mass Consumption of Agitation: “Fables of Faubus” (1960) ............... 149 Market Encroachment and the Disappearing Outside: Two Responses ...... 152 Coda ...................................................................................................................................... 156 Conclusion: Music and Meaning ........................................................................ 159 The Dynamic of Capital Accumulation ..................................................................... 163 Christopher Small: From World to Work ................................................................ 164 Raymond Monelle: from Work to World ................................................................. 169 The Sense of Music: Musical Topics .......................................................................... 178 The Sense of Music: Musical Temporality ............................................................... 182 Semiotic Solutions to a Social Problem .................................................................... 189 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 194 Biography .................................................................................................................. 210 vi Introduction: Musical Dreams and the Modes of Production How do the modes of our production relate to changes in musical form? By mode of production, I mean how the means to support human life are produced and exchanged. Under a system of capital accumulation, this means a world of commodities – primarily, the capacity to sell our ability to work in exchange for money, which gives us access to the things we need to survive. But for what reasons do we survive? The logic of capitalism dictates that we live only in order to work, that our desires should reach no further than our food and shelter, a livable wage to ensure our daily reproduction for the purpose of our employment until we are no longer needed for the accumulation of capital and are thereby extinguished. Either relegated to unemployment in order to leverage our precarity against our working compatriots, or otherwise left to die. This rather bleak story is however somewhat unconvincing when it comes to persuading someone to devote their life to their work, and so the capitalist dynamic relies on a system of ideas and beliefs – promised benefits and utopias that extend beyond its search for profit. 1 These ideas and beliefs, which are embedded in our social practices, and structure our understanding and interpretation of the world, can either convince us of capitalism’s necessity or persuade us to carve out an alternative. 1 Class-mobility; retirement; vacation; etc 1 In Marxist theory, the frameworks through which we understand ourselves and interpret the world, what we call ideology, have often been sequestered to a space called the cultural front, in distinction to that analytical field concerned with such things as the movement of labor and the accumulation of capital, called the economic base. 2 In this analytical division, any economic analysis should necessarily lead one to the realm of ideology, wherein our dreams, fantasies, and utopian desires motivate the choices and actions we take to survive and thrive under this system of constant profiteering; just as any ideological analysis should take us back to the dynamics of labor and capital, by asking in whose class interests do such utopian desires serve. These dreams and desires, and the ideologies from which they emerge, can be tinged with what Marxists have typically called “false consciousness,” wherein, for instance, the loss of your job or a cut in your pay may be understood to be the result of those foreigners, immigrants or “others,” willing to work for a lower wage, rather than a system of private property that pits workers in competition with one another for their survival to begin with. It is at the cultural front, where this battle over these ideological frameworks take place, that art has traditionally been placed. But how do these products of our labor, which we call art, express certain dreams and ideologies, if at all? 2 See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Longman, 1984); Slavoj Zizek The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). The former gives different takes on the concept of ideology, the latter focuses on why certain ideologies take the forms that they do, and how they “stick.” 2 Marxist theory calls this the problem of “mediation,” which is generally concerned with the relationship between the superstructure (culture) and the base (economy). For is the superstructure determined by the economic relations of its time, thereby making all cultural products and ideological systems simply the expression or determination of this or that economic shift, or does the superstructure prefigure and/or create new kinds of social relations and political struggles that reconstitute the economic base? There is a long history to this debate, and each answer tends to reflect, given the political possibilities of their time, the writer’s position in terms of where they end up placing their emphasis (i.e., the dynamic of labor and capital; or the ideological motivations that sustain it). For now,