Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz

Description

Central to the development of abstract art, in the early decades of the 20th century was the conception (most famously articulated by Walter Pater) that the most appropriate paradigm for non-figurative art was music. The assumption has always been that this model was most effectively understood as Western art music (classical music). However, the musical form that was abstract art’s true twin is jazz, a music that originated with African Americans, but which had a profound impact on European artistic sensibilities. Both art forms share creative techniques of rhythm, groove, gesture and improvisation. This book sets out to theorize affinities and connections between, and across, two seemingly diverse cultural phenomena. Cover Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz Abstraction Conditions of music Adorno and jazz Modernism Recording Notes 1 The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions and Rags The word (and problems of definition) Jazz Music as modernity The essential and the hybrid L’art nègre Sheet music and performance The emergence of nascent jazz in Europe Notes 2 Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting Orpheus Jazz modernism Montmartre to Puteaux Jazz abstraction, and jazz as art Dance and new rhythms Kupka Painting machines and jazz Hot jazz Le Jazz Notes 3 Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image Rhythm and proportion Dionysian jazz13 Orphic cubism Orpheus/Orphism Orphic jazz Sonia and Robert Delaunay Charles Delaunay Apollinaire’s perspective Illumination Ideograms, sounds, words Picabia and music Duchamp and words The Armory Show: New York 1913 Gabrielle Buffet Gleizes Picabia rendre Paris Notes 4 Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm La Musique est comme la Peinture Combs Duchamp’s objects Improvisus (more words on improvisation) Kandinsky’s improvisations: America and the Orphic spirit Arthur Garfield Dove (1990–1946): records and painting ‘Gramophoning’: materiality and meaning Willard Huntington Wright A rhythmic synaesthetic diversion (via China and Greece) Notes 5 Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond Duchamp’s painting Encore à cet astre Askew: A doodle and a Derridian diversion New objects Part 2a: Objects Part 2b: Gesture and rhythm CODA: Fabienne Verdier In praise of hands Notes Index