This essay was written as part of my course work at University of Sydney in October/November 2024. Thanks to Rachel Campbell for the helpful reviews.
Introduction
In this essay I seek to investigate how discourses around coloniality and decolonization in jazz and in music institutions relate to Third-Stream Music. Third-Stream Music is presented as a case example to high-light the complexity of race dynamics in music institutionalism today and the challenge of engaging Afro-diasporic music with Western Arts Music in an inclusive way. I make the case that the fields of classical and jazz today remain largely separated in institution and enterprise and syncretic approaches of jazz/Western Arts Music still constitute a challenge to the status quo. Thus, I ask whether Third-Stream Music can serve as a tool for decolonization and help tackle structural racism in music. I make the case for nuanced investigations into such potentials asking how the challenges of Third-Stream Music may inform current debates around structural racism and coloniality in Western music institutions. It must be said that the term Third-Stream Music is not extensively used today and many works that clearly constitute a jazz-classical hybrid or synthesis are not labelled as such. For the purpose of this essay, however, colonial dynamics can similarly be observed in the reception of hybrid works by artists who do not employ the term.
Third-Stream Music, coined by Gunther Schuller in 1957 as a synthesis of Jazz and Western Art Music, has had a challenging reception history.[1] Main proponents of the Third-Stream Movement were John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, Charles Mingus and Ran Blake among others and its decisive moment was its initial emergence into jazz practices in the 1960s when it found itself at tension, yet historically intertwined, with Free Jazz, the Black Arts movements and class struggles during the civil rights movement. Unlike its rebellious creative counterparts, however, Third-Stream musicians advocated for changes within institutions of higher education, with many of its makers founding and forming innovative music programs and curricula. In European discourse Third-Stream Music was freighted differently than in America and fitted into teleological readings of composers and critics, who pursued a progression of modern music through integration of elements from African American Music-making into European Art Music, widely ignoring any concern of expropriation. Laying out parts of Third-Stream Music’s complex reception history as a case example, this essay pledges for a process of thorough historic deciphering regarding coloniality and Third-Stream Music.
Decolonization in Music Today
This essay will understand coloniality, following Quijano, as a structure that shapes our imagination and how we socially relate to each other in the creative community and to the music historically and ethically. Coloniality, as defined by Quijano, is an all-encompassing cultural imposition by the ruling class, rooted in all European colonial conquests that, after decolonisation, grew into today’s Euro-American hegemony, a culmination of “Western imperialism” and the underlying “structure of power” that produced all constructs now known as races, ethnicities and nationalisms.[2] Furthermore, coloniality is intimately related to modernity/rationality, forming the “interior of the imagination” of the dominated and “the intersubjective universe produced by the entire Eurocentered [sic] capitalist colonial power”.[3]
The socialist ethos in this reading of geopolitics and history notwithstanding – a stance which will resonate with early Third-Stream criticism discussed later – the notion of decolonizing curricula has gained much traction, recently, in Western music institutions.[4] Calls to decolonize Jazz have demanded addressing racial discrimination and critically examining the history of racism and colonialism in relation to jazz and music institutions in the West have increasingly heard calls to address structural racism. In the realm of music theory Philip A. Ewell tackled his field by claiming it is “white” and calling for an “anti-racist approach” rather than a diversity-approach to what might be called a decolonization of curricula, as to Ewell the simple diversification of staff and students technically only serves white institutions to mask “the white racial frame”.[5] To Ewell anti-racism must mean expanding curricula with non-white music.
But, as we will see the tension around Third-Stream Music shows the perils of defining what constitutes white and black music, an ever-present danger of racializing and essentializing musical culture. Dismantling coloniality and decentring whiteness and Eurocentrism in Western music institutions might also be achieved through structural reforms that allow for more malleability between musical practices such as trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural studies and by teaching historiographies that center colonial history in musicology. Third-Stream Music projects would have much potential within such reforms and extended collaboration between the classical and jazz departments could benefit both artistic communities. As for today, however, a classical hegemony in funding and departmentalization persists.
Third-Stream Music and the Racial Reproach
Decolonization in music promotes and celebrates it, yet precisely defining black music has been challenging.[6] Third-Stream Music’s reception in this regard has proven controversial. During the 1960s it initially found itself in an uncomfortable space seemingly unable to satisfy critics from a variety of fronts, and notably much of the dissatisfaction came from parts of the jazz community within.[7] As Coady has shown much of this tension grew with the rise of Black Nationalism in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.[8] Notably, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) openly accused John Lewis of “willful ‘indoctrination’” while expressing frustration over critics and their “white middle-brow standards of excellence”.[9] This stance, which is concerned with a Black American class struggle, may be read in the context of cold-war left-revolutionary discourses. Baraka, who in his poems “celebrate[d] black music and the black musician as the most accurate expressions of the socio-economic and aesthetic matrix of Afro-American life”, throughout the 1970s ideologically shifted from Black Nationalism to Marxist-Leninism.[10] His distaste for Third-Stream Music therefore comes as no surprise, since it had come to be associated with an African American elite.[11] In this political context what constitutes black music serves a class-struggle and to Baraka, whose landmark book “Black Music” (1968) can be seen to mark a first step to what today forms a wide field of scholarly activity, it was defined by what he perceived to be its “‘roots’” (…): the musical conventions of blues and bebop” – a “valuable legacy” that John Lewis “served to obscure”.[12] Thus, Third-Stream Music can be said to have troubled racial binaries in ways that have challenged black music advocates.
To decolonial thought in music, syncretic works such as the classical/jazz hybrids serve as subversive case studies that, even in our present moment, challenge critics. In a recent example, Canadian poet and writer George Elliott Clarke, in the aftermath of the critical reception of his “jazz-opera” Québécité (2003), grappled with the press’s “race-coded swipes at jazz opera qua form”, asserting that both fields, jazz and opera, still remain “puritanically distinct”.[13] Citing critics that express discomfort with pairing the two genres, Clarke claims the awkward reception of such hybrids derive from “psychologies of alienation”.[14] The fact that “the black artist in opera remains a crossover, open to charges of elitism at home and of infantilism from without” asserts the subversive potential of such crossovers to decolonial strategies: Syncretic works and Third-Stream Music as a creative tool for dismantling the colonial disposition.[15] Such a tool yields much potential to music institutions today in which decolonial ideas and practices have gained traction.
Expropriation, Teleology and Third-Stream Music
Having discussed Third-Stream Music’s potential to decolonialization the following critically examines post-WWII Western Art Music in relation to race, the expropriative context in which Third-Stream Music was formed. In this regard two essays by George Lewis, a former member of the “Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians” (AACM) are relevant to discourses around Third-Stream Music and decolonialization as his arguments unearth the complexity of racial hegemony in this period’s art music (and, as we will see below, the European Jazz avant-garde). Lewis deciphers the history of Post-WWII Western Art Music in its relation to what he coins “afrological” forms of musical practice.[16]Lewis asserts that, – spear-headed by John Cage’s derogatory dismissals of jazz – while the arising concepts of aleatoric music and indeterminacy (coined by Boulez and Cage respectively) in the Western Art Music avant-garde employed real-time decision making, black sensibilities and African American improvisatory practices are not given adequate credit for these developments.[17] This denial of influence constitutes a racialized form of appropriation from black music practitioners, a continuum of segregation upheld in art music discourse.
Third-Stream Music advocates in Europe were situated in such contexts as well and reproduced racialized aesthetic judgements. Notably, Czech composer Pavel Blatny, an enthusiast for Third-Stream Music who engaged improvising classical and jazz musicians in his works, grappled with the question “What can jazz provide for new music?” and answering: “the spontaneous, the elementary, the folk-musicianship, [original: das Musikantische] that particularly dramatic tension which characterized the interpretation of jazz music from its very beginnings”.[18] These rather essentializing tropes, alluding to what now might be identified as black music or afro-diasporic music, reflect a still largely common stance toward jazz in Western Art Music institutionalism today. Decolonialization today should produce historiographies that examine such Third-Stream Music projects with regard to race while acknowledging the progressive intentions of Third-Stream Music advocates such as Blatny in the context of their time, however flawed.
Furthermore, Third-Stream Music came to be during a moment at which European jazz, firstly, downplayed African American influence and secondly, was subject to clear aesthetic divisions. George Lewis, in “Gittin to Know Y’All”, shows that the European Free Jazz movement of the 1960s – while clearly relating their work to their American counterpart, particularly to artists from the AACM – claimed to be forming a distinct musical identity, a process that heavy-weight critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt pointedly coined “emancipation”.[19] Berendt’s broad influence on post-world-war II jazz in West-Germany has been scrutinized ever since.[20] But his advocacy as a restless defender of jazz in the concert hall must be seen in the context of a musical landscape that was upholding a clear division between music for entertainment purpose (U-Musik) and “serious” music (E-Musik) that largely excluded jazz and non-European music. Composers, Stravinsky for instance, had used jazz-harmony and topics in compositions without serious engagement with – or giving credit to – African American music that disqualified to be E-Musik, and it was Berendt’s intent to hold jazz up to the high-brow expectations. Thus, following this teleological reading of jazz as finding its place among higher ranks, Berendt initiated projects that can clearly be labeled Third-Stream Music before Gunther Schuller coined the term, commissioning pieces that combined Western Art Music and jazz in the early 1950s.[21] Hence, the dismissive view that Jazz and African American music must subject to the authority of “serious” music looms largely over Third-Stream Music in Europe. Decolonial critique should ensure that Third-Stream Music today does not reproduce such hierarchies.
Third-Stream Music Education as Decolonial Strategy
What jazz signifies to African Americans has changed. While Jazz, particularly bebop, throughout its history challenged conceptions of what constitutes art music and popular music – or high-brow and low-brow – it can be observed that jazz today – much like Western Art music – is largely consumed by middle and upper-class listeners.[22] In fact regarding jazz’s African American listenership, Graham in 2011, following Gioia, asserts that jazz music is consumed by listeners of other high-brow music and practiced in institutions that preserve it as art.[23] Analyzing data sets from 1982 to 2008, Graham notes that the late African American jazz listener is “educated and urban” and that they are “cultural omnivores”, meaning they listen to a wide range of other music genres also. Graham adds that education is the key variable to determining African American’s preference for jazz and that in today’s desegregated context jazz might serve as a marker for African Americans “displaying pride in their racial identity”.[24] Thus, it can be said that decolonization in jazz institutions today is up against a different set of racial dynamics than Third-Stream Music was in the 1960s when racial segregation at large persisted.
The history of racial dynamics that Third-Stream Music and jazz were situated in must be read as historically contingent and malleable depending on its context: From militant class struggles in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the context of cold-war grand-narratives, to a more “omnivorous” subversion by an educated African American intelligentsia. As with Third-Stream Music in the 1960s it would be too simple to conclude that jazz as high-brow today constitutes only assimilationism to “serious”, “white” or upper-class music. Third-Stream Music’s disposition as discussed earlier always presented an ambivalence, at once clearly situated in expropriative contexts while also breaking racial boundaries. Hence, Third-Stream Music’s critical reception was always confronted with a double bind: Reading Third-Stream Music as either elitist, betraying the African American class struggle, desegregation and decolonization, or, alternatively, as subversive and liberating through trans-cultural progressive engagement. Similarly, today’s jazz consumer breaks boundaries through cultural omnivorousness, a diversification of genres and styles engaged with while also, however, focusing mainly on high-brow culture and preserving jazz as a marker of middle or upper-class status.
A critical historic reading of Third-Stream Music carves out its potential to decolonization while also marking its perils and limits. In its relation to education and omnivorousness decolonial strategies could employ Third-Stream Music projects in music institutions as tools to break racialized aesthetic boundaries. On the other hand, while one might see more potential for Third-Stream Music projects than other styles of black music making to receive support in heavily funded Western Arts Music institutions (festivals, conservatories, opera-houses, orchestras etc.) such projects will be tempted to bow to the aesthetic judgements of Western Arts Music’s hegemony. Colonial logics persist in different forms and as such Third-Stream Music must be used – if at all – in a culturally sensitive way to meet the moment and serve decolonization today.
Conclusion
In this essay I have laid out some of the potentials and perils of Third-Stream Music for decolonization historically and today. Decolonization in music institutions can benefit from Third-Stream Music projects as they trouble racialized aesthetic norms. However, Third-Stream Music projects historically have shown to assimilate to Western Art Music’s hegemonic cultural imposition and contemporary Third-Stream Music will find itself in a similar disposition. Ergo, confronted with this ethical and aesthetical dilemma, Third-Stream Music today must be revised to adequately serve decolonization.
[1] Gunther Schuller, Gunther Schuller : a life in pursuit of music and beauty (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 437.
[2] Aníbal Quijano, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural studies (London, England) 21, no. 2-3 (2007),https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353, 168.
[3] Quijano, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” 169; 171.
[4] “Is classical colonial?,” The Critic, 2022, accessed 18. October, 2024, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-2022/is-classical-colonial/.
[5] Philip A. Ewell, “Music theory and the white racial frame,” Music theory online 26, no. 1 (2020),https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.26.2.4.
[6] See also: Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). The research into what constitutes black music has progressed. More recently Samual Floyd thoroughly investigated characteristics of jazz and African American music in its relation to African indigenous practices particularly the ring shout, also calling for an expansion of scholarship into black music. The contemporary research around black music has added much nuance to the historiography of African American music.
[7] David Joyner, “Analyzing third stream,” Contemporary music review 19, no. 1 (2000), 63-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494460000640141.
[8] Christopher Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 172.
[9] Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music, 172.
[10] James A. Miller, “”I Investigate the Sun”: Amiri Baraka in the 1980s,” Callaloo, no. 26 (1986), https://doi.org/10.2307/2931086, 189.
[11] Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music, 83.
[12] Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music, 173.
[13] George Elliott Clarke, “Jazzing up opera: A defence of Québécité,” In Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance, ed. by Mary Ingraham, Joseph So, Roy Moodley et al., (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 194.
[14] Clarke, Jazzing up opera: A defence of Québécité, 194. Summing up critic’s trouble with his work Clarke writes: “Geoff Chapman deems jazz opera an unlikely and usually unsuccessful combo because “the one genre is freely imaginative and mainly instrumental, the other is disciplined and structured with emphasis on voice” Downbeat’s Mike Chamberlain agrees that the pairing is not “a natural fit” (n.p.). Miller muses that Québécité’s singing echoes “the vernacular of various pop styles rather than the bravura tradition of opera””
[15] Clarke, Jazzing up opera: A defence of Québécité, 194.
[16] George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black music research journal 16, no. 1 (1996), https://doi.org/10.2307/779379.
[17] Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.”
[18] Pavel Blatny, “Was kann der Jazz der Neuen Musik geben / Was kann die Neue Musik dem Jazz geben?,” Jazz Forschung (1970) no. 3/4 (1971), 217, 220, translated by author.
[19] George E. Lewis, “Gittin’ to know y’all improvised music, interculturalism, and the racial imagination,” (2014).
[20] Andrew Wright Hurley, The Return of Jazz – Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009) 126.
[21] Hurley, The Return of Jazz – Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change, 24-25.
[22] Guthrie P. Ramsey, “We Called Ourselves Modern: Race Music and the Politics and Practice of Afro-Modernism at Midcentury,” (United States: University of California Press, 2003), 108.
[23] Roderick Graham, “Jazz consumption Among African Americans from 1982 to 2008,” Journal of black studies 42, no. 6 (2011), 994. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934711400602. Following: Ted Gioia, History of Jazz, (Cary: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[24] Graham, “Jazz consumption Among African Americans from 1982 to 2008,” 993; 1011.
