BL ST 14 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Musical Form, Jargon
Document Summary
Jazz aesthetic is criticality and form: critique injustice - content, criteria of fine form - form as rebellion, black experience of us, innovative new fine form (looking forward at spirituals, work songs, blues) Banjo and bones (form of drums) first form: work songs [south] Journal of a resience on a georgia lantation. West africans - dignity of agricultural labor. Whites - embrace song as expressing their own folk attitudes towards work, prison, etc. White admiration for black performance style turned against blacks. Zip coon (successful middle class free blacks in urban north acting uppity) third form: spirituals. Colonel of an all black regiment in civil war who commented seriously on spirituals he heard around the campfires. Slow in tempo, mournful, nobody knows the trouble i have seen . First to label spirituals as protests against slavery. Chorus - seem unmeaning jargon, full of meaning to themselves. In code, a desire for a better life in this world.
