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theses

The ontological status of jazz tunes is a fraught topic that has generated much philosophical and analytical debate. A given tune may be represented by many lead sheets, each one different from the last in its representation of the tune’s melody and chord changes. Performances of tunes are even more diverse: musicians realize harmonies differently, substitute and interpolate chords, interpret the head melody differently, solo extensively over the chord changes, and so on. When analyzing a jazz tune, it is therefore difficult to determine exactly what is being analyzed.

The entire concept of the jazz tune is underlain by a paradox: on the one hand, there is a singularity -- "the tune" -- generally understood to be a musical structure or scheme comprised of constellations of harmonic, melodic, and formal features; on the other hand, there is a multiplicity of versions of the tune, manifest in performances and recordings by countless musicians and ensembles and as printed lead sheets, transcriptions, and arrangements. A sufficient understanding of the jazz tune requires us to engage tunes as both singularities and multiplicities, situating tunes as the products of various poietic and esthesic processes.

In this dissertation, I develop a cyclical, processual model of the jazz tune. My model begins with a multiplicitous network of existing versions of a tune. Borrowing terminology from sketch studies and the literary field of genetic criticism, I call this network of documents an "avant-texte." By analyzing the relations between various versions of a given tune, we can gain a sense of the overlapping contexts that inform an improviser’s conception of the tune. Improvisers become familiar with one or multiple versions from the avant-texte and form a referent for the piece, prototypes consisting of various kinds of musico-structural features and levels of defaults. When features are shared between referents, they often represent stock schemata that can be used to more quickly grasp the structure of many different tunes. Referents and their component schemata are subjective mappings of musical structure that capture some of the flexibility inherent in prototypes. Improvisers use these mappings in the moment of improvisation as part of an ongoing negotiation of musical structure. The resulting improvisation represents a new version of the tune, which in turn may become part of the tune’s avant-texte network. In order to engage with all aspects of this model, I advocate for a method of analysis that accounts for the varied subjective views that help construct a jazz tune’s perceived identity.

ETD_10813

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-xm2q-jp29

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.