We got this from our brilliant colleague, the composer Professor Anthony Kelley. It is from Etude magazine and it contains a fascinating set of opinions of “prominent men and musicians” (and one female composer, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach) about “The Jazz Problem.”

What was The Jazz Problem?  Well, opinions differed.  Some saw it as a straightforward process of racial contamination of American music

“Jazz is to real music what the caricature is to the portrait…If jazz originated in the dance rhythms of the negro, it was at least interesting as the self-expression of a primitive race. When jazz was adopted by the “highly civilized” white race, it tended to degenerate it towards primitivity.”

That’s Frank Damrosch, Director of the Institute of Musical Art,  and a vocal proponent of musical racial purity. He had more to say on the subject — making it clear that part of the problem was the fact that jazz both distorted and borrowed in ways he found offensive.

“When a savage distorts his features and paints his face so as to produce startling effects, we smile at his childishness; but when a civilized man imitates him, not as a joke but in all seriousness, we turn away in disgust. Attempts have been made to “elevate” jazz by stealing phrases from the classic composers and vulgarizing them by the rhythms and devices used in jazz. This is not only an outrage on beautiful music, but also a confession of poverty, of inability to compose music of any value on the part of the jazz writers.”

The unselfconscious racism is remarkable.  For her part, Mrs. Beach was clear that the whole thing would lead to… er..  dancing

“[T]aken however in association with some of the modern dancing and the sentiment of the verses on which many of the “jazz” songs are founded, it would be difficult to find a combination more vulgar or debasing.”

John Philip Sousa, interestingly was much more sanguine

“There is no reason, with its exhilarating rhythm, its melodic ingenuities, why it should not become one of the accepted forms of composition.”

And many of the participants seem to agree that jazz was best in the hands of musicians who happened to be, well, white..  musicians like the aptly named Paul Whiteman.  But there were also moments when they acknowledged that this vital strand of American music had come from a culture that had been subjected to some forcible cultural remix itself.

“Good syncopation is legitimate and probably enjoyed to the limit by many people who are slow to admit the fact.  It has been evolved naturally from negro songs and dance tunes and is the characteristic American music if we have such a thing.“  [emphasis added]

Jazz did in fact  reach across racial lines — arousing hysteria in the process — as we say in our forthcoming comic.  But the reaction ran both ways.    Again and again as we have done our research, we have seen the borrowing question arise on at least two levels.  First, what practices of borrowing inside a particular tune are legitimate — philosophically, aesthetically, as a matter of religious doctrine, morally, and finally legally.  Second, what strands of musical tradition can be borrowed, remixed, and inserted into a different musical culture?  Which ones must be resisted as other, alien, debased, dangerous?  Culturally, the Anxiety of Influence runs deeper than we know.

(Picture updated — thanks Blaise, for keeping me honest…)

After our first comic (which has been downloaded over 300,000 times from our site alone and which also sold lots of copies despite being available for free)  one question I got asked a lot was “how do you actually create a comic?”  For me, learning how to design and write the comic (Keith does the drawing) was both very hard and a lot of fun.  If you are an academic, your minimum atomic unit of linguistic meaning is the paragraph, maybe the page.  Having to reduce complex, technical ideas into images and speech bubbles — no footnotes!  no complex dependent clauses! — was a form of creativity unlike anything I’d done before.

This is the first page of the comic… at least so far.  Jennifer and I do the initial design.  We send Keith a script with parallel columns — images on one side and text on the other.

The instructions look something like this

AK It is 1812, and that’s Francis Scott Key watching Fort McHenry being bombarded by the British..

(cannon ball soars from scene, drops in water in front of AK, JB, JJ… steaming)

..he wrote a poem about it in 1814, called “The Defense of Fort McHenry”,

.. AK picks it up at first it reflects him and then changes to show Anacreon drinking scene

but it didn’t achieve true fame until he set it to the tune of “The Anacreontic Song” – a British drinking song from 1778 – and it became

[Cannon ball clouds and clears to show 15 star flag]

JB, JJ together
“The Star Spangled Banner”….

AK Which became the musical emblem of the nation.

[flag morphs into butterfly shape…]

AK ..so in 1898 when Puccini wrote Madame Butterfly, he made it the theme of Pinkerton, the American naval officer…

[Butterfly morphs into Stratocaster]

AK ..but even a Pinkerton detective couldn’t have imagined what the song would sound like, 71 years later, played by a young man called….
JB and JJ  Jimi Hendrix!!

Then Keith applies his genius and sends us a sketch that looks something like this.

Our research on the borrowing in US patriotic songs becomes a list of instructions like this

which in turn becomes

Then we revise and redesign by phone and skype — there are always more words you can cut, more ways to use images to convey the meaning.  We  try and catch our errors and we are given our instructions for revision. (Jennifer is not only a researcher extraordinaire, she is also the queen of the task list.)  Keith redraws more firmly, the final stage before inking…

The comic flies through 2000 years of musical history, the development of the unruly technologies that allowed us to think that music can be owned (notation, printing, recording, digital distribution), the changes in musical practice and attitudes towards composition, quotation and owning, and the introduction of the law into it all.  Researching it has been utterly fascinating — and writing it has been a blast.  What does the final inked version look like?   If all goes as planned, sometime in Spring 2011 you’ll be able to find out.