I’m very grateful to have been admitted as a doctoral research student at the University of Sydney, Australia. My deep appreciation goes to everybody who made this step possible and supported me throughout these last years.
After three years of planning I look forward to reconnecting with my place of birth through this way and forming new relationships.
I will pursue the studies while based in Switzerland with yearly residencies in Sydney: The first this upcoming July-September.
This forms a new chapter for me personally and I’m excited about what this new pathway will reveal.
The following is from my research proposal…
The challenge of third-stream music. Interpreting its history and composing new works for string quartet and jazz piano trio.
Synopsis
I will compose a body of third-stream music. In my research I will follow Gunther Schuller’s labeling of works that combine Western arts music and Jazz as third-stream, which can be extrapolated to identify many works from the early 20th century until today. Interpreting the history of third-stream will inform about its challenges. This includes investigating the reception history of third-stream music, how the word is charged in America and Europe and how race dynamics attribute to this reception. In addition, I will investigate the musical challenges of syncretic works with respect to composition, improvisation and performance practice. Drawing from this I will compose a body of new works for string quartet and jazz piano trio.
Research Objectives
In 1957 Gunter Schuller coined the term third-stream at a lecture at Brandeis-University, Massachusetts as a musical idiom that merges the western arts tradition with jazz.[1] Among his closest colleagues and proponents of the third-stream were pianists John Lewis, Ran Blake, George Russell and Bassist Charles Mingus.[2] However, there are countless other examples of syncretic approaches to Western Art and African American Music. These include for example works by Scott Joplin namely his Opera Treemonisha, J.P. Johnsons adaptions of Rachmaninov, Hazel Scotts adaption of Chopin, The Symphonic Ellington but also interpreters and composers from the western arts canon who borrowed heavily from or worked with jazz musicians – these include Friedrich Gulda, Sofia Gubaidulina and South African pianist and composer Surendran Reddy.
The reception of third-stream and the classical-jazz hybrids has been challenging to its advocates. David Joyner observes: “For much of its history third-stream music has been caught uncomfortably between the worlds of Western European arts music and jazz, at times apparently unwelcome in either world and thus causing its practitioners and advocates to fight an aesthetic battle on two fronts simultaneously.”[3] John Lewis reception history for instance highlights how critics within the American press responded differently to his confluent works. The African American press warmer reception stands in contrast to the jazz press’s skepticism towards Lewis’s “burgeoning of composition in jazz”, which reflects a broader discourse around black identity and assimilation in an emerging African American middle class.[4]
The American critique of the third-stream show similarities to the skepticism that European artists of syncretic works faced, a prominent example being classical pianist Friedrich Gulda of whom music critic Robert Fischer writes: “Friedrich Gulda’s forays into jazz were at the time frowned upon by the high priests of classical music like something that one had to endure at best, because he played Mozart so beautifully.”[5] This resentment would go so far that Gulda’s producer at the British label DECCA threatened to “drop him like a hot potato, if he continued to be publicly associated with jazz”, which marked the end of their collaboration.[6]
Third-stream music has been subject to criticism from many different agents. Moving further I want
to investigate how this relates to an ongoing discourse about how black music is freighted in institutions, improvisation in western art music and how race relations inform aesthetical reception. I have argued that most of the rancor addressing the third-stream movement came from within the jazz community rather than from conservative advocates of art-music culture and that resentment of syncretic works in Europe overlap in the way the cross-disciplinary attempt was perceived.[7] However, while the American critique of third-stream and the European reception of classical artists playing jazz have much in common, they are informed by different discourses about composition and improvisation.
Music discourses in the U.S., particularly around third-stream music, are subject to Eurocentric efforts in institutions, press and public life. The critique of third-stream music in the U.S. is informed by a discourse about Western art music and jazz that has positioned one above the other.
Notably, George Lewis investigates in his landmark essay improvised music biases in the perception of music that incorporates real-time decision making, theorizing, following Fiske, that it is through “exnomination” that whiteness disguises itself as a force, that actively denies non-white sensibility as a credible agent for the creative advancement of Western music.[8] As an example, Lewis mentions John Cage describing the Cageian conception of real-time decision making in music, quoting Anthony Braxton: “Both “aleatory” and “indeterminism” [Cages terminology] are words which have been coined (…) to bypass the word improvisation and as such the influence of non-white sensibilities”.[9]
Thus, to Lewis, black music and jazz are inherent in American post-war Western art music. However, it is not given credit and African American improvisatory practices are downplayed and even erased in some discussions of art music. This racial dimension plays into how third-stream music is freighted in the U.S. and the resentment of it within the jazz community reflects the “bitterness over the longstanding struggle of blacks to validate their art within the mainstream of American culture”.[10]
In Europe the reception of syncretic works is subject to a long legacy of 19th century discourses around the nature of musical works. J. Ayerst sites the immergence of Werktreue, the fidelity to the score in the 19th century as the beginning of an erosion of improvisation by the European performer, that was ever so present in the improvisation of cadenzas, the ornamentation and basso continuo of baroque and organ music.[11] Following Louis Althusser he argues “implicit values and beliefs within the cultural institutions of classical music form an ideology which dominates the individual in a way described as ‘hegemonic’”.[12] Thus, the press’s suspicion towards improvising classical musicians, such as those embracing jazz, is informed by a hegemonic understanding of the performer as a mere servant to the composer, faithful to the score.
In this DMA project I seek to uncover the complexity of the discourse around third-stream music in which racial arguments about improvisation and 19th century European arguments about fidelity to the work wrap around each other.
Drawing from above my academic research will orbit around the following three questions:
- What does the reception history of third-stream music reveal about the challenges of interdisciplinary works of jazz and Western arts music?
- What experiences do contemporary artists of syncretic works make regarding reception, musical collaboration, and race dynamics?
- What insights can I draw for my own works from my investigation into third-stream music?
I would now like to elaborate on compositional aspects of third-stream music and on my own work.
The compositional portfolio to this DMA project will constitute of new works for an ensemble of string quartet and jazz piano trio (two violins, viola, cello; piano, bass, drums). I view this ensemble as emblematic to the challenges of third-stream music: The string quartet with its compositional legacy within the Western arts canon, charged with a European understanding of Werktreue and the jazz piano trio as the most often recorded formation in jazz and its rich history and tradition, highlighting improvisational practices.
There are several compositional challenges to third-stream music. Joyner identifies a lag of swing-feel as the main musical critique in past reviews of syncretic works adding that “the nature of bowed string instruments seems particular susceptible to this kind of rhythmic short-coming”.[13] On the other hand, rhythmic vamps that serve as an improvisational foundation over a strong pulse feel can push the string players in an uncomfortable place and reduce them to a mere background texture.
This is why many third-stream arrangements do assign separate sections for rhythm-section and orchestral parts, effectively segregating the grooving or swinging sections from the moments of classical interpretation of pulse.
I have made a further observation regarding the rhythm-section in configuration with string players: Large-scale classical forms can compromise the groove experience of the rhythm-section. To this point Robert Loren Brown’s analyzes of a catalogue of syncretic works from the early 20th century to the 1950s in regard to large scale form has identified Artie Shaw’s Concerto for Clarinet as the only obvious case of significant borrowing from classical large movement forms, while others constitute a classically inspired development rather than a commitment to large-scale western art forms.[14]The absence of certain forms, archetypical to the Western arts canon – the sonata form or variation form for instance – points to their restricting properties for African American improvisational practices.
Drawing from these experiences my compositional research will orbit around the following three questions:
- What ways of string quartet writing liberates players from the constraints of Werktreue?
- What kind of prompts within the score yield improvisatory activity from players and which signify constraint and liberation?
- What ways of musical organization allow for large form composition yet facilitates improvisation?
[1] Gunther Schuller, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2011), 438.
[2] Schuller, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, 438-439.
[3] David Joyner, “Analyzing Third-Stream,” Contemporary Music Review, 19, no. 1, (2000), 64.
[4] Charles Smith, 25 Years of Jazz, Down Beat (1959), 26 (16), 37-39, quoted in Christopher Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of Real Black Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 108.
[5] Robert Fischer, “Anything goes” In All that Jazz. Die Geschichte einer Musik, edited by Michael Jacobs (Stuttgart: Reclam-Verlag, 2007), 428. Cited in Wikipedia: Friedrich Gulda, accessed January 6 2024, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Gulda. Quote translated by author.
[6] Langen Müller, Friedrich Gulda: Aus Gesprächen mit Kurt Hofmann, (München: F.A. Herbig, 1990), 78. Quote translated by author.
[7] Joyner, “Analyzing Third-Stream”, 73.
[8] George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Center for Black Music Research – Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press, 22 (2002): 223-24.
See also: George Lewis, “Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 1, No. 1 (2004), 4. Lewis elaborates here on the history of improvisation and jazz in post-war Europe, noticing a bias within European improvisatory “emancipation” from an African American cultural hegemony: “What is new here is the ironic use of the reference [to emancipation] to simultaneously unify Europe under the banner of whiteness, and to portray as subaltern the culture that, until recently, had dominated the planet.”
[9] Anthony Braxton, Tri-Axium writings, volume 1, (San Francisco (?): Synthesis Music, 1985), 366. Quoted in Lewis, “Improvised Music”, 223.
See also: Samuel Floyd, “Toward a Philosophy of Black Music Scholarship,” Black Music Research Journal, 2 (1981-82), 72. Floyd calls to reform scholarly activity around musicology while identifying a lack of recognition of black music’s contribution to Western music: “The exclusion or token treatment of a musical genre such as jazz is iniquitous, especially since it is fast becoming basic to anything that can be called American music, and since its products and its virtuosi are comparable in sophistication to those of the European tradition.”
[10] Joyner, “Analyzing Third-Stream”, 73.
[11] Jonathan Ayerst, “Are Classical Musicians Excluded from Improvisation? Cultural Hegemony and the Effects of Ideology on Musicians’ Attitudes Towards Improvisation,” Contemporary Music Review 40, no. 4 (2021): 444.
[12] Ayerst, “Are Classical Musicians Excluded from Improvisation?” 440. Ayerst cites as general reference: Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, transl. Ben Brewster, (New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
[13] Joyner, “Analyzing Third-Stream”, 83.
[14] Robert Loren Brown Jr, “A Study of influences from Euro-American Art Music on Certain Types of Jazz with Analyses and Recital of Selected Demonstrative Compositions,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1974), 32-41.
