Elastic Form and Concrete Structure: the analysis of improvised music

The jazz style of the bebop era normally consists of a theme (the ‘head’), supported by a harmonic pattern supplied by a rhythm section. The significant musical argument, however, is an improvisation over the harmonic changes by one or more melodic instruments. The changes themselves are circular and selfperpetuating, resulting in a form which is infinitely extendable, even though the structure itself appears fixed. This paper considers the nature of form in improvised jazz from an intertextual, intratextual and ‘inter-ethnic’ stance, and considers the style of the bebop era as a kind of music-language-game, the understanding of which depends upon an awareness of both what is evident in any performance and, more significantly, what is implied beyond it. Key-Words: musicology, analysis, jazz, language-games, form, structure, Parker Twentieth-century musicology has described musical form in terms of abstract structural paradigms, where melodic and harmonic constructs serve to articulate the structural boundaries within which the compositional endeavours take place. The traditional proof of, for example, a Classical sonata, refers to first and second subject groups, that is, discrete melodic and thematic fragments that have clear and unequivocal identities, and which are supported by a marked harmonic design. As all compositional aspects referring to pitch, harmony and rhythm of the work are predetermined, those elements of the work, at least, can be fixed in notation allowing them to be observed and analysed outside of their temporal context. Consequently, it has proved possible to study the micro-structural aspects of musical works with ever-greater sophistication and refinement, so that, in some instances, the pitches and motivic fragments of pieces need never be considered within the context of a temporally embedded realisation of the work. This somewhat introspective stance encourages an essentially synchronic view of music to emerge, seeing, as it does, the artwork as a non-referential ‘thing in itself’, creating reductive conceptual boundaries which, because of the categorical nature of analysis, must exclude as they reduce. Emphasis is placed upon unity, and the need to demonstrate wholeness and autonomy in the artwork. Indeed, Thomas Christensen described as ‘a formalist prejudice’ the widely accepted position in much twentieth-century musicology that ‘an artwork receives aesthetic value commensurate to the degree that it can be analysed as an autonomous entity’. [1] This mode of analytical enquiry stems largely from the radical impact of positivistic thought at the start of the twentieth century, and particularly Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. [2] Wittgenstein’s ontology describes the world as essentially atomistic, with the elements of signification combining to create facts or ‘states of affairs’. It is an essential aspect of this philosophy that the relationships between elements can be directly and objectively specified. For Wittgenstein, states of affairs are logical, rational and limited, and meaning is fixed, exact and exclusive. But what of music that does not share this mode of existence; music which relies upon, and is indeed defined by the moment-by-moment creative input of the performer? Jazz and other forms of popular musics have long been tacitly assumed to be the poorer cousins of Western art-music, since they do not possess the same kind of harmonic, melodic or structural complexity. Some supporters of jazz have sought to redress this imbalance by attempting a kind of legitimization of jazz, by analysing its constructs as though it were a piece of Western art music; focussing attention on pitch-class sets, ‘labelling’ chords and motivic types, and, in general, applying the methodology of positivistic analysis in the hope that the work may become ‘justified’ since it, like other pieces of Western