MUSI 180 - Defining Jazz Music

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

“What is jazz? Is it art, a disease, a manner, or a dance? Has it any musical value?,” questioned the famed American bandleader Paul Whiteman in 1927. “After twelve years of jazz,” he admitted, “I don’t know…It is too early to tell.” For a renowned proponent such as Whiteman, defining this emergent artform and its sociocultural characteristics posed a great challenge. Even today, no easy answers can be found for Whiteman’s century-old questions.

Coined by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “The Jazz Age,” the 1920s also resisted one simple description. During the decade, it seemed as if change was the true constant. Cities transformed through automation and industrialization. New audio and media technologies disseminated compositions and performances across the world. And the booming American economy offered more leisure time to a liberalizing, youthful consumer class. As we will see, the various musical styles called “jazz” often accompanied, and in some cases helped to stimulate, many of these modern trends that would eventually shape today’s world.

This first-year writing seminar addresses Jazz Age culture through contemporaneous literature, scholarship, criticism, performances, and compositions. Focus will be given to blues singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith; jazz symphonists George Gershwin and William Grant Still; virtuoso instrumentalists Louis Armstrong and Lead Belly; band leaders Duke Ellington and Count Basie; Broadway songsters Irving Berlin and Cole Porter; and other influential artists. While exploring their lives and music, we will write program notes and record reviews, in addition to scholarly reports, encyclopedia entries, and historical fictions that portray Jazz Age lifestyles. By the end of the course, we hope to arrive at more comprehensive understandings of The Jazz Age and its diverse musical impulses.

Alexander Bonus

Open only to first-year students; satisfies college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.

May not be counted in the requirements for concentration.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS