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Steve Larson
Analyzing Jazz: A Schenkerian Approach.
Pendragon Press, 2009: x+204 pp.
($99.00 paper)
Benjamin Givan
156 J o u r n al o f M u sic T h e or y
2 The recordings can be found on the following OJCCD-263-2); Bill Evans, Conversations with Myself
CD releases: Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Himself (Verve, 314-521-409-2).
(Riverside, OJCCD-254-2); Monk, Monks Greatest Hits
3 A recording of Larson playing his transcription of Petersons
(Columbia Legacy, CK65422); Oscar Peterson, Freedom
performance can be heard at www.stevelarsonjazz.com/
Song (Pablo, 2PACD-2640-101-2); Bill Evans Trio, At
all_Round_Midnight.html (accessed June 9, 2010).
Shelleys Manne-Hole, Hollywood, California (Riverside,
158 J o u r n al o f M u sic T h e or y
established practice, both within and beyond jazz, suggests this principle may
not always be applicable.
The book raises many such methodological questions that will engage
a variety of readers besides theorists specifically interested in the discussed
musicians or seeking an exemplary model for applying Schenkerian tech-
niques to jazz. Some such questions are addressed in the second chapter,
which was previously published as a Music Theory Spectrum article. Larson
begins it by broaching the global topic of whether it is even appropriate to
analyze improvised music with a theory devised for composed works, which
is probably a less contested matter today among the volumes target audience
of music theorists than it was when he first confronted it a quarter century
ago, skepticism among this constituency having since abated. Nevertheless,
these pages provide a welcome opportunity to reflect on the authors thought-
provoking viewelaborated in Larson 2005that (good) jazz embodies cer-
tain of classical musics key aesthetic principles even better than does classical
music itself. In the end, I imagine that todays theorists will largely find his
fallback rationale sufficient: analyses should be judged by their results, and
even if composed and improvised musics are indeed substantively dissimilar,
close analysis helps explain their differences. The converse of Larsons argu-
ment is of course that Western art music may be receptive to theories origi-
nally conceived for other idioms, a disciplinary avenue whose considerable
potential has only recently begun to be explored (see Cohn 2010 for a recent
example).
Larson rightly notes that jazzs characteristic chromatic tonesninths,
elevenths, thirteenths, and so forthlikewise occur in many tonal classical
works, where they have often received orthodox Schenkerian interpretations
that reduce them to underlying triadic structures. Naturally, Schenkerian
theorys inherent drawback in this respect is that it often effaces unique or
atypical features; all else equal, a priori norms are assumed to supersede
idiosyncrasies at deeper structural levels. And Larson acknowledges that
jazzs chromaticism occasionally eludes the theory altogether, such as when
Monk superimposes a chords unresolved major seventh and raised eleventh
over a low-register root and fifth. Faced with such unequivocal flouting of
common-practice norms, we inevitably run up against the ultimate method-
ological question: is the problem with the music or with the theory?
Before offering his own answer, Larson turns to one other issue: whether
jazz musicians intend to create the complex structures shown in Schenkerian
analyses. This discussion is in my view among the books most valuable
contributions, even though both the question and Larsons answer seem to
me rather tangential to the study overall. We are treated to a masterful exege-
sis of an excerpt from Bill Evanss 1978 radio interview with fellow pianist
Marian McPartland in which Evans describes, both verbally and with keyboard
demonstrations, his conscious thought processes while playing the popular
song The Touch of Your Lips. Evanss explanation of how he goes about har-
monically elaborating a basic structure is strongly redolent of Schenkerian
notions of diminution and prolongation. Yet, as a rationale for applying
Schenkerian theory, it seems to me inequitable to demand that jazz musi-
cians exhibitto adopt David Temperleys terms (2006, 283)declarative
(verbally articulated) knowledge rather than simply productive (implicit)
understanding of the relevant theoretical concepts, given that no such burden
of justification is ordinarily placed upon Western canonic composers such as
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. At any rate, Larson has no such expectations
of his other subjects, Monk and Peterson, whose music he analyzes without
citing any comparably self-reflective remarks of their own. Nonetheless, his
meticulous account of Evanss interview, a fascinating glimpse into a legend-
ary jazz artists creative process, deserves to be widely read, especially by those
who may underestimate the degree to which professional improvising musi-
cians can be consciously self-analytical about their craft.
But when all is said and done, what more do we gain by gazing at jazz
improvisations through an interpretative lens whose principal ideological
function has, by and large, been to valorize European canonic masterworks
of centuries past? Larson, to his credit, is completely forthright. Schenkerian
analysis is, he contends, a means of qualitative assessment: it may either show
the shortcomings or illuminate the exceptional quality of any given jazz
performance. For allaying misgivings among those remaining conservative-
minded art-music scholars, this unabashed application of Schenkers aesthet-
ics to a twentieth-century African American musical idiom may well be rhe-
torically effective. Yet such an unqualified claim seems liable to alienate
musicologists and ethnomusicologists, for whom cultural relativity and his-
torical contingency are bedrock beliefs. This is unfortunate, for such readers
have much to learn from Larson. Might these graceful analyses have instead
been presented, more circumspectly, as guides only to those aspects of the
music that intersect with traditional European formal principles? And might
we allow that structural features that Schenkerian theory treats as shortcom-
ings could well be facets of exceptional quality from an Afrodiasporic per-
spective? Schenkerian analysis, as Larson has demonstrated beyond all doubt,
can greatly enrich our knowledge and appreciation of jazz improvisation at a
fine level of musical detail, but to make the strongest case for it we should
modestly acknowledge its limitations.
Works Cited
Berry, David Carson. 2004. A Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography
with Indices. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon.
Cohn, Richard C. 2010. Brahms the African, Kwashi the German. Paper presented at the
First International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music, Amherst,
MA, February.
160 J o u r n al o f M u sic T h e or y
Forte, Allen. 2011. The Development of Diminutions in American Jazz. Journal of Jazz Stud-
ies 7: 323.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2009. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New
York: Free Press.
Larson, Steve. 2005. Composition versus Improvisation. Journal of Music Theory 49: 24175.
Owens, Thomas. 1974. Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation. Ph.D. diss., University
of CaliforniaLos Angeles.
Steinbeck, Paul. 2007. Review of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experi-
mental Music, by George E. Lewis. Journal of Music Theory 51: 33340.
Temperley, David. 2006. Review of Music in the Galant Style, by Robert O. Gjerdingen. Journal
of Music Theory 50: 27790.
Winkler, Peter. 1978. Toward a Theory of Popular Harmony. In Theory Only 4/2: 1418.