Richard Sennett The Conscience of the Eye (1990) p. 207--"I often saw this graffiti [of the New York subways] in my mind's eye when I listened to my son play the violin. The Suzuki violin method teaches a child to play music before he or she knows the names of the notes; the method stresses beauty of tone and expression from the first lesson. When a pupil first begins the violin in the Suzuki method, the teacher therefore performs a generous act. On the neck of the violin the teacher tapes down two little strips of blue plastic, so that the student knows exactly where to place his or her first, second, or third fingers... The beginner is thus spared that excruciating experience of playing sour, out-of-tune notes. By converting the violin into something like a guitar, the teacher makes the student the gift of pitch. "At first the student accepts this gift without reservation. You put your fingers down exactly where the tapes are and that's that—you've solved the problem of pitch. In this early stage one of the tapes on my son's violin once came off by accident; he asked me to fix the instrument so that he could play again. I suggested, with the parent's knowing, infuriating helpfulness, that he find instead where the finger goes by listening to the sound it makes. This proposal would have robbed my son, however, of the certainty with which he began. "As the lessons went forward he learned more and more to listen to how he sounded, and in the process those little bits of tape began to annoy him too. There was the day that he learned that the violin, made of natural materials, changes its tone according to the temperature and humidity of the weather; some days the blue plastic bands were accurate guides, other days not. Then he learned that the same note has different shades, depending on the key in which it appears. Perhaps his most decisive experience in using these tapes was the month in which he found out how to create vibrato on a string. ... [208] As he moved through each of these stages, hearing more, the plastic tape seemed an arbitrary answer, precluding the ear's discoveries. About a year after he began, he removed the plastic tape with which I once refused to "fix" the violin. "Such progress on the violin is what musicians call learning to listen with a third ear. It can be described more philosophically: the student learns there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty. In music concreteness means the student hears as if he or she were listening to another person playing; one's playing then becomes a tangible thing to be studied. Uncertainty means, in music, that the more the student can hear himself or herself in this way, the less satisfying musically are gestures that are at first easiest for the hand. My son, once he began to listen with a third ear, experimented with holding his left hand in odd postures that produce sour notes under some conditions and sweet notes under others; when he conducted these experiments on his left hand he was less concerned with problem-solving than with problematizing. "It was, as I say, as my secretarial self wandered over the relation of the concrete and the uncertain in music during those scrapings necessarily attendant upon executing "Twinkle, Twinkle Litle Star," that the graffiti of the subway appeared in my mind. The metal subway walls or the brick walls of buildings had no inherent character for those who sprayed them; these were planes to write over, whereas my son was learning to explore things for their own properties. But the exploration of his materials had a disturbing result. What made him engage even more concretely with them was uncertainty about how to draw sound out of a wooden box fitted with strings. This education was turning him outward, to judge his own expression, orienting his senses to results rather than intentions. It was an education in the "it," whereas the children making graffiti knew only the declarations of the "I." To speak of making things in an exposed condition...is to talk about creating uncertainty and possibility in a thing. An untaped violin makes, in Hickeringill's diction, discoveries to its player. And there is a virtue to making something as an exposed, uncertain "it" rather [209] than a declarative "I": the violinist became more critical of the quality of the expression than the graffitist, for he could judge the sounds as things in themselves. "Our culture puts a great value on concreteness, at the expense of abstraction. ... The emphasis on making things concrete is a reflection of the value modern culture puts on objects—objects endowed with solidity and integrity. ... The uncertain seems to belong in the domain of insubstantial hesitation and tender-hearted, inward subjectivity. But toleration of uncertainty is as much a part of scientific investigation as of artistic creativity. A scientist who proceeds methodically from one self-evident fact to the next discovers nothing. ... Focusing on the concrete is satisfied by discoveries which reveal the unexpected and the problematic. It is in this sense that there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty. "Power enters into this correlation. The implication in a Miesian, sublime object is of domination by the maker over the eyes of those who passively appreciate his or her creations, whereas a more uncertain object should invite reciprocal intervention. Graffiti on a New York street reflects this power relationship: the walls of the "I" dominate others who had no choice in their making, who cannot participate in their form, who can only submit to them—though with no awe. The graffitist repeats over and over again his "I"...he confirms his sign. This "I" establishes an aggressive rather than an exploratory relation to the environment." Harry Partch Genesis of a Music p. 8--"For the essentially vocal and verbal music of the individual—a Monophonic concept—the word Corporeal may be used, since it is a music that is vital to a time and place, a here and now. [That's weird. I thought "corporeal" meant something like "relating to a person's body, especially as opposed to their spirit" (-Google)] The epic chant is an example, but the term could be applied with equal propriety to almost any other important ancient and near-ancient cultures—the Chinese, Greek, Arabian, Indian, in all of which music was allied with poetry or the dance. Corporeal music is emotionally "tactile." [Because it "relate[s] to a person's body, especially as opposed to their spirit"? (-Google) That's pretty weird, because emotions per se are non-material.] It does not grow from the root of "pure form." It cannot be characterized as either mental or spiritual. [Yep, that's what google says. But, care to say anything further about the body?] "The word Abstract, on the other hand, may be used to denote a mass expression, in its highest application, the spirits of all united into one and transported into a realm of unreality, neither here nor now, but transcending both. [Already Harry is kicking the cigarette machine, or perhaps just stuffing strawmen. None of these presences ("mass," "highest," "united," "transported," "unreality") follow necessarily from the mere absence of corporeality; or at least he has chosen to assume that they do rather than showing that they do, and to assume that we agree with him. Seriously, "The spirits of all united into one"? Criminy, if that were even possible doncha think he'd be advocating for it rather than warning against it?] The symphony is an example. Abstract music grows from the root of non-verbal "form," how "pure" being a matter of individual opinion. It may be characterized as either mental or spiritual. [I mean, that's just...horrible? Actually it sounds rather essential to a full human existence. There was plenty of abstraction in the ancient world. It's not new.] It is always "instrumental," even when it involves the singing of words, because the emotion of an individual conveyed through vitally rendered words would instantly end the characteristic domination of non-verbal "form." [This is very true, but it is dangerously incomplete. The missing part, perhaps more morally urgent and relevant now than in Harry's day, is that "the emotion of an individual conveyed through vitally rendered words" unavoidably directs attention to the "individual" in question in a way which abstract music cannot quite achieve. Abstraction swallows the self, which is why it is feared and despised with equal fervor by so many otherwise distinct musical polities: petty-bourgeois conservatory extroverts, populist-radical singer-songwriters, racialist jazz critics, et al ad nauseum. And yet it can also be said, without contradiction, that instruments can just as reliably be counted on to elicit "emotion" in a way that violates the conceit to abstraction, at least as Harry presents that conceit here. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but it is not controversial or interesting. What is interesting is whether anyone, listener, performer, composer, critic, or laboratory scientist can wrest control of all of this for the purpose of "expression" (Harry fools no one when he says "conveyed" rather than expressed or communicated). I don't think we've figured this out yet, despite the repeated claims emanating from one and all of the aforementioned groups that they have figured it out, claims which tiresomely recapitulate something like the literary concept of the intentional fallacy; and I think that if and when someone truly figures it out then the party really, truly is over at that point, and I expect the aforementioned factions would not fail to notice this and hence would then become even more hysterical and intolerable than they already have become, but without realizing that it was the thing they wanted for all the world to be true finally coming true that actually ended the party. All of which is to say that Harry, despite being a pantheon artist, probably hasn't figured it out either, hence his division between abstract and corporeal is functionally an individual, chaotic, moment-to-moment matter, one of those paradoxical artifacts of consciousness which can exist only in the past and never in the present or future. It's not that the distinction doesn't exist, it's that it is very difficult for actual people to isolate it on an experiential or phenomelogical level. As such I find it interesting to think about but ultimately rather useless pragmatically.] "Thus the mere presence of words in music is not itself the criterion of its classification. The chants of the Roman church, early in its history, were actually in a language that none but the learned clergy understood, [9] though some of them were sung with the natural rhythm and inflections of the Latin words. An important distinction, then, as regards the Corporeal and the Abstract, is between an individual's vocalized words, intended to convey meaning, and musicalized words that convey no meaning, whether rendered by an individual or a group, because they are beyond the hearers' understanding, because they have been ritualized, or because of other evolvements of rendition." p. 15--"Whether one interprets history in such a way as to ascribe the "independence" of music to the beginning of the Christian era or to a later time, there is no question but that, very close to the beginning, it became a new art. It became a language in itself. The insistence with which this simulation was carried on is manifest in the "motives," "subjects," "phrases," "questions," "responses," and "periods" of our musical forms, all entirely apart from the circumstance that sung words might be involved. [16]"The fact is that the ancient spirit was gone. And it was gone because the ancient, lovely, and fearless attitude toward the human body was gone. Musical "morals" denied the human body—through the one agent of the body that they could control: words from the vocal organ—because the "mother morals" denied it and have succeeded in nursing this denial, yea these many centuries. D.H. Lawrence advises us never to forget that "modern morality has its roots in hatred, a deep, evil hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body." How could the "morality" of music conceive anything different, anything different at all, than occasionally a bastard exception?" So, it was a conspiracy. Of course it cannot have been. To the extent that "mother morals" are organic/endemic, it is believable that some functionally essential self-hatred might lie at the root of music reception across history, and there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to line up behind this theory. Still, the notion that Abstract music arises directly from this, or that having once, sometime, arisen directly from it we may never again for any reason take it seriously should it arise from any number of other pathways, for any number of other reasons, this strains credulity. What strains credulity further yet is the notion that even if this were the case the Abstract can have no further potential even as the social world continues to change at a dizzying pace. Far too many bodies invade my various screentimes these days, exploiting my instinctive, intuitional, procreative side to get me to look at and, perhaps, purchase some product I don't really need or want. At that point, I may well decide that it's time to leave the house and go sit in silent, rapt attention with hundreds or thousands of other human beings, contemplating sound as an abstraction, having a bodily experience of sound that is highly dependent on the presence of so many others' bodies while prescribing only their presence in the space and a minimum of ritual etiquette, but without prescribing any further normative conventions for presenting or experiencing their bodies so long as the mouth part of the body can shut itself without great strain or struggle for a statistically negligible portion of its total time on earth. I am committing the sin of reasoning my way to this choice, as if I had not already been delivered there by nature and nurture alike. But seriously, do you really want to watch another YouTube ad for Car Chase Warcraft Mythos? And if you can't avoid it completely, don't you need to equlibriate every now and then? p. 34--"This faculty for putting himself—his Corporeal self—into his music, [Hugo] Wolf acquired "from no teacher," says the biographer Ernest Newman. "It was clearly congenital in him." Like Moussorgsky, Wolf embodied a deep and broad sympathy for humanity, and also like Moussorgsky, "his music needed . . . constant fertilisation of the actual word if it was to bear its richest fruit."" I personally cannot reconcile the lines "putting himself...into his music" and "a deep and broad sympathy for humanity." The best I can do is to grant that these two traits are not, in theory, necessarily mutually exclusive, even though in practice they do seem to be pretty much mutually exclusive in the world I have lived in. Beyond that, I can't see any reason why one should necessarily follow from the other. p. 49--"Eighteenth-century classicism, compounded of the spirit of Abstract esthesia in the early ecclesiastical music and the mechanics of Corporealism in the popular forms—the innovations of discant, rounds, faux bourdon, dances—produced an abundance of Abstractionist technicians in the execution of "form": conductors, instumentalists, singers. Consequently those composers whose individualities fitted the bill of Abstract goods—like Bach, who enhaloed all he touched, from jigs to masses, with the poly-[50]phonic nimbus of the Abstract—got assurance of authentic reproduction and posterity for their music from the Abstractionist technicians, whereas those composers who did not fit this particular bill, like Moussorgsky, got—Abstractionist technicians! "This is not to suggest that anyone is proposing an ecumenical prohibition of the Abstract. There is nothing wrong with Abstract music as such, but it deserves a better fate than to serve as the testament of the scribes and the pharisees, the press-badge of gratuitous "emcees" at circumcision, the squire of the musicians' union, and an article of merchandise for the minions of the subscription series and for those other more obscure "lovers of music" whose "loving" ears are tuned in only on the cash register. [Funny, that sounds like the customary list of shills for corporeality. Especially the unions and the merches. But I imagine things were quite different back when Harry was writing this.] "In view of this situation, which has been general for some little time, it is not congenital pessimism which has prompted the repeated assertions of defeat for the Corporeal spirit in music; it is simply knowledge of the "technical" situation." So, where is the line between Harry's "corporeal[ity]" and the SELF-ness that later ME-generations have brought to...pretty much everything ? Is it possible to "end the characteristic domination of non-verbal "form"" without bringing the self into higher relief? Conversely, is there any aesthetic regime aside from the Abstract which does a comparably good job of unleashing the personality while denying the self? In short, under present conditions (if not under certain others), is corporeality not unavoidably also an extra or a particular emphasis on the self as content ? Any "no" argument would seem necessarily to depend on appealing to some universal experience of the body, or of one of only a couple/few bodily archetypes, such that any peculiarities of individual bodily experience could be either explained away as unimportant or just erased altogether. Further, the prevailing anthropological theories of the origins of "music" suggest that, in Harry's terms, ALL music is ultimately "corporeal" in terms of the listener's reception equipment. By this logic, the abstract-corporeal distinction would line up not along the boundaries that Partch lays out but rather along spectromorphological ones. i.e. the more voicelike, the more corporeal; the less so, the less. In such heavily reductionist terms I don't think this idea is all that radical or debatable, though it does evince a certain Determinism which is not too easy for us workin' artists, given our various conceits to selfhood, to make peace with. The "corporeal" qualities of horns and strings are well-known, much-discussed, and frequently deployed. In the hard version of the Evolutionary Accident theory of music's origins, the historical development of the design and deployment of said instruments is itself evidence of a certain convergence or teleogy toward an ideal which is strictly determined by anatomy-physiology: Anatomy Is Destiny, this time above the belt as well as below. That is too "hard" a version for my tastes, as it also is, indidentally e.g., for Steven Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals. But I have often wondered just how Partch could reconcile his "corporeal" ideal with what is, to my ears, the quite UN-coporeal quality of most of his instruments; un-corporeal, that is, in being very un-voicelike spectrally. Quite unlike the nontransferable experience of bodies and emotions, the morphology of blocks and bowls is rarely lost. (Or is that just because we already have a pretty good idea of what these things are supposed to sound like?) Hence the ultimate irony: these are not bodies but objects. They are the ultimately abstract sound sources. By insisting on starting over vis-a-vis instrument design and construction, the most radical break Partch makes is actually a break with hundreds or thousands of years of development TOWARDS HIS OWN CORPOREAL IDEAL. And in print too, here it is as if he has swallowed whole the various Poietic Fallacies of all of the "abstract" musicians whose music deploys voicelike horns and strings, musicians who cannot quite be said to be ignorant of this corporeality, nor fully in touch with it. Indeed, if corporeality is so natural, then complete ignorance and complete awareness are both bound to be elusive. He accepts their contention that their music is "abstract", because the making of it was "abstract" to them, and he opposes this to his notion of the "corporeal." Perhaps there is even some talking past each other here, as the central issue of "abstraction" in European music, once anyone became aware of it as an idea in itself, was in explicit opposition to narrative or representation, not necessarily (though perhaps also?) to corporeality. In any case, calling them on their fallacy would mean preempting his own project, something no artist of his caliber would ever do to themselves. They are much better at taking one side of an irreconcilable polemic and digging in. This is also what I am doing right now. But I do wonder if given a time machine and a chance to hear some top-40 radio and some pop-music-major graduation performances from the 1990s and on, Harry might have been jolted into noticing this alliance between corporeality and the self. I will say for myself, at least, that since attaining my artistic majority I have noticed little else with such acuity as this. p. 36--"It must be said that Corporeality is present beneath the Abstract habiliments of many other compositions. ... "Superficially, [such] judgments are suspect, but actually they betoken a healthy procedure—to admit, maintain, and proclaim that no preconceived end result can be achieved through formula, any formula, that is unvivified by the systole and diastole of spontaneity, purpose, thought, emotion, or whatever the symbol of the ingredient which has significance for some section of humanity. The formula for Corporealizing music through preserving the vitality of spoken words is actually as much a cliché as the sonata, and is lacking in imaginative, emotional anima unless the composer himself releases it." [[*****BELOW HAS BEEN UPLOADED*****]] Jean Cassou "The Nostalgia for a Métier" in Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (1963) ed. Wylie Sypher pp. 399-409 p. 405--"Think of the tragedy of modern artistic consciousness. Try to discern first of all what it really is. We are led back to the inception of the creative act, where the artist can do only what springs from himself alone; and without knowing what his work will be or how it will be received (save that he is utterly sure it will be refused) he appears as a nearly unknown, useless, nameless creature... "It is the grandeur and honor of modern art to have put the accent on this first step in the artistic process, that of conceiving, to have reduced the definition of art itself to conceiving, it being clearly understood that each conception is not an a priori abstraction, that it comes into being only by manifesting itself as a form. But in that form what [it?] signifies is its problematic character: it is a proposal, a hypothesis, an abnormal and subversive venture. And its inventor can only doubt its viability. For in [406] its behalf he has no guarantee, no guarantor. No teaching has guided him in developing it, and since he is alone in his corner and it in no way resembles things produced by certain, sanctioned, and regular methods, it seems to him that the world will not know what to make of it. [406]"Besides, this is precisely one of the current opinions about modern works of art: they are studio experiments, fabrications of the mind, theories. ... Each of these lonely, odd creators, each of these paupers who had only their own talent, devised a little sudden and surprising thing with the depth of a cry. But it seemed necessary to them to make this cry live, to give it endurance that it might be accepted. Therefore, Cézanne, in his humble and pitiful jargon, spoke of "realizing." He had to accomplish this realization. So two aspects of creativity distinguish themselves: that of conception, the meditation by which the artist under the sting of his gadfly invents for himself his needed symbols, his plastic world, that by which he is himself...; and on the other side, the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world and his work a living reality, recognizable and acceptable in the monumental unity of a culture. Under this second guise, artistic creation enters a domain where society encounters it. Art and society: the métier is their common meeting point. "Undeniably, the revolutions in modern art, formidable in their bursting variety and their dizzying succession, have obliged us to stress the speculative nature of artistic creation: everyone has had his theory, this one, an analysis of light, that one, about the structure of things, and in behalf of each, a single man among men, lonely among men, has spoken his work, cried his cry. Yet the need for realizing that tormented Cézanne, the nostalgia for a métier his fellows confessed, leads us to understand another essential step in the process which is a making, and which ought to create works by means of a synthesis of all [407] kinds of knowledge and experiments, those which homo faber has at his disposal as master of his medium, his tools, his hand. And in fact, modern art has produced works—innumerable and admirable works. And for all his anguish, Cézanne did realize. [407]"Confusedly aware of that basic necessity for a work of art to manifest and maintain itself as a rich and organic product of workmanship, modern artists have dreamed, and do dream, of seeing themselves identified by society as craftsmen, and qualified craftsmen. A craftsman qualifies by his métier; and by demonstrating that he knows rules proper to his métier, the artist inevitably determines his personal genius—not by rules imposed in any way from outside, but evolving inside the métier itself from the nature of the material worked and from adapting this material, at last, to a style in art. "This social restoration of the artist's métier goes along with the rehabilitation of the notion of the craftsman. The term "masterpiece" belongs less to the vocabulary of the artist than of the artisan. Doubtless the artist's masterpiece, and especially the modern artist's, appears at first glance like the fruit of theoretical speculation, the discovery of a new world of sensibility, a system of freakish forms, a stroke of fantasy, the exhibition of a unique, strange, unbalanced mind. It also is, and should be, and purports to be, a thing well-made, a masterpiece in the craftsman's sense, an artifact: and let us think of it as an artifact, a thing worked up. Worked up, indeed, by methods simpler than those at the command of the powerful and complex industry of our day with all its apparatus of vested interests, offices, and services, but analogous to its products, and no less deserving esteem, worthy in every way of inspiring pride in its maker had he, like the craftsman of yesterday or the skilled worker of our own age, been the one to make it alone. For this reason, today's painters are anxious to train themselves in the crafts one calls "applied," ceramics and glasswork, whose products are devoted to practical use. Many—and among them, the best—have turned to tapestry. And everyone realizes that they have fully revived this old French craft after a century of decline, and have given it a luster equal to that of its most [408] brilliant epochs. Talent has lost nothing in submitting to the rules of a craft. On the contrary, it has shown itself and continues to show itself precisely there, in endless variety. Our admirable revivers of tapestry...have tackled their work by accepting the strictest demands of this métier as it was practiced in its purest days...in contrast with that virtuosity and bravura into which it was allowed to fall while seeking to imitate the iridescent nuances of painting—namely, while encroaching upon the realm of a neighboring métier. But what a lesson a true, honest métier that knows itself and keeps its bounds, its logic, its terms, brings to the talented creator—what a chance to develop a severe and robust power." Quite a reclamation of the "artifact" here. LeRoi eat your heart out? Even with everything else having become abstract,
realization
must
still
result
in
an
artifact
,
and artifacts are definitionally concrete, no matter what they are thought to portray or represent.

In so being, the artifact testifies also to the artist's concrete existence
,

happily somewhere beyond the mere
depth of a cry
,
and happily somewhere short of
the powerful and complex industry of our day with all its apparatus of vested interests, offices, and services
.
The artifact hits the spot the postindustrialism forgot.

As such perhaps the artifact, now (certainly not always), also is
the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world
as LeRoi says (p. 152) is true of
Negro music
. Now, why exactly should this answer-in-search-of-a-question be available only to
Negroes
? I'm asking for their sake more so than anyone else's, tho several people have pointed out to me that I also evince
certain attitudes
of which
the result
is quite emblematic indeed. It would be unfair to LeRoi to demand him to account for concerns such as Jean raises, and vice versa, so far is each writer's own authentic interests and objectives from that of the other. Both are at least consistent in their means and ends, even as they could undoubtedly plug some sizable blind spots by paying each other more heed. But just as LeRoi finds a certain narrowness of orientation in evidence in the white establishment of his day, so we may notice (do we really have to try all that hard?) a similar narrowness in his own orientation. The above passage from Jean, encountered purely by chance as this series was in preparation, in fact presents a near-ideal foil. LeRoi is basically interested in the métier of being Black. Not that he or much of anyone else would ever want or need to apply such an overwrought loanword to the particular "hypothesis" he is interested in pursuing; and yet, most everything Jean says above about the métier, and most everything LeRoi says about being Black, suggests that they are presenting similar arguments about similar social dynamics with similar ends in mind. Proceeding from the initial fact of unspeakable violence,
Negro Music in White America is a music subsumed,
nearly unknown, useless, nameless
,
an abnormal and subversive venture
of some variety or another. To LeRoi's point(s),

we can easily see why
Negro music
could not be
recognizable and acceptable in the monumental unity of a culture
,
because there was no such
unity
to which this music might have addressed itself. Actually, LeRoi does not say too much about address per se. He does however return frequently to questions of expression.
p. 28 If we think of African music as regards its intent, we must see that it differed from Western music in that it was a purely functional music. Borneman lists some basic types of [29] songs common to West African cultures: songs used by young men to influence women...; songs used by workers to make their tasks easier; songs used by older men to prepare the adolescent boys for manhood, and so on. "Serious" Western music, except for early religious music, has been strictly an "art" music. One would not think of any particular use for Haydn's symphonies, except perhaps the "cultivation of the soul."
[Gotta love how he makes it sound so terrible. Those soul cultivators really should get to work laboring, influencing women, and frat-hazing their adolescent sons! Raise your hand if that sounds like a good time?!]
""Serious music" (a term that could only have extra-religious meaning in the West) has never been an integral part of the Westerner's life; no art has been since the Renaissance. Of course, before the Renaissance, art could find its way into the lives of almost all the people because all art issued from the Church, and the Church was at the very center of Western man's life. But the discarding of the religious attitude for the "enlightened" concepts of the Renaissance also created the schism between what was art and what was life. It was, and is, inconceivable in the African culture to make a separation between music, dancing, song, the artifact, and a man's life or his worship of his gods. Expression issued from life, and was beauty."
[Here is the crucial line. By "crucial" I mean the line whose moral ramifications have been altered the most drastically by everything that has changed since 1963. By which I mean, expression is now, even leaving aside its unsightly epistemological baggage, quite ugly. Expression can no longer be beauty after it has been so used and abused. Expression after Keeping Up With The Kardashians is something in the ballpark of writing poetry after Auschwitz. But certainly this has not always been the case. I am willing to indulge at least that far.]
"But in the West, the "triumph of the economic mind over the imaginative," as Brooks Adams said, made possible this dreadful split between art and life. Hence, a music that is an "art" music as distinguished from something someone would whistle while tilling a field."
[He calls this "dreadful!" Show of hands, who wants to go listen to Haydn, and who wants to go till a field?] And of course there this harrowing passage (considered previously).
The Western concept of the cultivation of the voice is foreign to African or Afro-American music. In the West, only the artifact can be beautiful, mere expression cannot be thought to be.
...

Desmond always insists he is playing an instrument, that it is an artifact separate from himself. Parker did not admit that there was any sepa-[31]ration between himself and the agent he had chosen as his means of self-expression.
"conception" Considering in hindsight the direction that things actually have taken in the intervening half-century, there is something of an irony for contemporary readers in the way LeRoi and Jean have respectively mapped this particular territory
:

namely
,

Jean has tried (perhaps unconvincingly) to reassert the element of

address

in the work of the
modern artist
, this at a time when the accusation of non-address (or address only to elites, or to fellow professionals) was beginning to wear itself out for having been repeated endlessly
; and meanwhile
,

LeRoi has tried
(quite convincingly as a matter of reportage, but begging all manner of political and moral questions)
to reassert the purely personal,
express[ive]
nature of pre-Jazz
Negro music
,
music which was less an

address,

it would seem,

than a

message in a bottle.

As both writers are aware, they are trading in ideals and reductions. The reality, of course, is that most "modern art" has been summarily rejected by non-elite audiences, while the Blues went on to form the basis of American Popular Music for the better part of The American Century. One way out of this irony is to decide that the intellectuals (of all races!) are full of shit, to check out on the intellectuals, and to check in on the Kardashians. If only for sport, I personally find it more interesting to attempt a reclamation of the ideals: in the case of the modern artist, I think the accusation of non-address to an audience was never either valid or constructive; and in the case of the Blues, I think the ground has shifted sufficiently that at least some version of the art-life division has more to recommend it now than it has ever had before. This is what I think, because it is what I want to think. Demonstrating its empirical plausibility is a longer-term project at which we can only hope to nibble here. [[*****ABOVE HAS BEEN UPLOADED*****]] Whereas Jean makes much of
the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world
,
LeRoi bends over backwards to downplay this.
as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact.
(p. 211)
And earlier,
The trumpets, trombones, and tubas of the brass bands were played with a varying amount of skill, though when a man has learned enough about an instrument to play the music he wants to play, "skill" becomes an arbitrary consideration.
(p. 75)
This last statement lays bare the disjuncture, since for Jean skill cannot be arbitrary, and the reason it cannot be arbitrary is because it forms a/the basis upon which a newly-minted work of art, no matter how stylistically esoteric, is never quite as unfamiliar as the plebes' visceral indigestion tells them that it is. LeRoi's strongly ambivalent feelings about the inevitable arrival of a certain technically astute Negro music at precisely this stage of broad cultural techno-comprehensibility are revealing; and the revelation is less flattering the more seriously we take Jean's thesis about the métier.
[188]"The Negro music that developed in the forties had more than an accidental implication of social upheaval associated with it. To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding. For one thing, the young musicians began to think of themselves as serious musicians, even artists, and not performers. And that attitude erased immediately the protective and parochial atmosphere of "the folk expression" from jazz. Musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie were all quoted at various times as saying, "I don't care if you listen to my music or not." This attitude certainly must have mystified the speakeasy-Charleston-Cotton-Club set of white Americans, who had identified jazz only with liberation from the social responsibilities of full citizenship. It also mystified many of the hobbyists, who were the self-styled arbiters of what Afro-American music should be. ...

[189]"For the first time critics and commentators on jazz, as well as critics in other fields, attacked a whole mode of Afro-American music (with the understanding that this attack was made on the music as music, and not merely because it was the product of the black American). The point is that because of the lifting of the protective "folk expression" veil
[!!has LRJ not been seeking the entire time to restore a similar veil of expression on the level of the socio-cultural, and, if we're being honest, of the racial too?? for protect[ion]? probably not! but protection is the inevitable result! and that is regressive! this passage explains exactly why!]
from a Negro music, the liberal commentators could criticize it as a pure musical expression. And most of them thought it hideous. ...

[190]"It seems to me an even more fantastic kind of sophistry that would permit a white man to give opinions on how he thinks a black man should express himself
[but he JUST SAID these were attacks on music as music?! so this was just cover for white critics to say how they think a black man should express himself?! or is he TAKING IT PERSONALLY after himself implying (literally on the previous page) that it was no longer to be taken personally?!]
musically or any other way, given the context of the liberal social organism, but under the canons of "art criticism," this kind of criticism is obligatory.
[sure, most critics are worthless parasites. duly noted]
So then, if only by implication, bebop led jazz into the arena of art, one of the most despised terms in the American language. But, as art, or at least, as separated from the vertiginous patronization of the parochial term folk art (which often resulted in the lugubrious quotes with which I prefaced this chapter), the Negro music of the forties had pushed its way into a position of serious (if controversial) regard.

...

[191]"What seem most in need of emphasis here are the double forms of assimilation or synthesis taking place between black and white American cultures. On one hand, the largely artificial "upward" social move, demanded by the white mainstream of all minorities, and the psychological address to that demand made by the black bourgeoisie, whereby all consideration of local culture is abandoned for the social and psychological security of the "main." On the other hand, the lateral (exchanging) form of synthesis, whereby difference is used to enrich and broaden, and the value of any form lies in its eventual use. It is this latter form of synthesis (certainly available and actual, to varying degrees, since the first black man came into America) that became so important after World War II, and even more magnified after the Korean War. The point is that where one form of synthesis, which was actually assimilation, tended to wipe out one culture and make the other even less vital, the other kind of synthesis gave a local form to a general kind of nonconformity that began to exist in American (Western) society after World War II..."
What LeRoi insists upon, really, is not so different from what Jeanhas said about the modern artist
:

above all, the notion that any
rules
such as may emerge, may not be
imposed in any way from outside
,
but instead must
evolv[e] inside the métier itself from the nature of the material worked
.
As the Gershwins said,
Who could ask for anything more?
But the problem is that,
in LeRoi's account
,

the métier itself
has not been freely chosen by the craftsman

(and, per above, may/could/should (?!) also come with certain ground rules for certain Others to observe in any discussion of it...which is sort of a drag)
;

rather
,

the guild has chosen it for them,
or
perhaps

(and this is worse)

denied it to them
without possibility of appeal
,

or
perhaps

(this is today the worst
because
it is everywhere)

insisted that it is their birthright even in absence of any indication of properly artistic inclination or ability such as the analogy to a craft guild would suggest must be defended against dilution.
it was assumed that anybody could sing the blues. If someone had lived in this world into manhood, it was taken for granted that he had been given the content of his verses, and as I pointed out earlier, musical training was not a part of African tradition—music like any art was the result of natural inclination.
(p. 82)
What is unique about jazz is that,
the first jazzmen were from both sides of the fence—from the darker blues tradition and a certain fixed socio-cultural, and most of the time economic, stratum, and also from the "white" Creole tradition and its worship of what were certainly the ideals of a Franco-American middle class.
(p. 139)
Hence,
as jazz developed after the early twenties in this country, it could only be a music that would reflect the socio-cultural continuum that had developed within Negro America from blackest black to whitest white. The jazz player could come from any part of that socio-cultural spectrum, or at least combine sufficiently the older autonomous blues tradition with the musical traditions of the Creoles or the ragtime orchestras of the North. And thus, jazz could not help but reflect the entire black society.
(pp. 139-140)
Previously and elsewhere, however, the situation was not so flexible.
Such a thing as a middle-class blues singer is almost unheard of. It is, it seems to me, even a contradiction of terms.
The beauty of jazz, then, its musical and political beauty alike for those so inclined, is to a great extent a function of its class inclusiveness.

Similarly for race as for class, there are
double forms of assimilation or synthesis taking place between black and white American cultures
,
a certain
lateral (exchanging) form of synthesis, whereby difference is used to enrich and broaden, and the value of any form lies in its eventual use
.
Most importantly, this
gave a local form to a general kind of nonconformity
.
This last part especially seems to me like the right idea. I just want to add that when one's
culture
has been chosen for one (this time before the fact), one can only expect to feel precisely the ambivalence at the thought of such syntheses that LeRoi evinces throughout these pages; whereas the occasion ought, ideally, just maybe, to call for a bit more of the equanimity and solid workaday contentment of Jean's artisan. Or,

more pessimistically
,

perhaps it is merely a choice
between

alienation from the Others within a fragmented society
,

or

alienation from the total unity of one's (ostensibly unified) society
.

Or,

as in the (admittedly obnoxious) parlance of high culture and academia, perhaps a synthesis per se is something that intellectual laborers labor their entire life in order to have a chance of achieving. It is an achievement rather than a given. The statement that
Expression issued from life, and was beauty
bespeaks not mere cultural differences but, dare I say, the specter of outright cultural anathema. Maybe that is the point LeRoi is trying to make, and maybe I am not really saying all that much by rephrasing it endlessly. My point, if there is to be one, is that one of these options looks, at least to me, much more attractive than the other in light of so-called current events. In any case, LeRoi thinks he knows exactly what the métier of being Black is, and he's so sure he's right about what it is that he is comfortable casting a sizable minority of Black people out of the tribe the minute they so much as have the thought of, say, assimilating to the white mainstream or amassing wealth. This recapitulates in reverse the fallacy of the white arriviste who asks the individual Black person,
What do your people think?
In contrast to the postindustrial musicians' union which no longer requires a tryout, LeRoi plays the overzealous journeyman who would rather the guild died with him than lower its standards. In so doing he not only encroaches on people's self-determination, he also hoists the full weight of all such existential angst as Jean's passage speaks to onto this narrow, personal definition of a hereditary, predestined, exclusive identity. "the artist under the sting of his gadfly invents for himself his needed symbols" For his part, Jean is at pains to make clear that the insecurity of the modern artist is itself generative. LeRoi makes much the same point about Black people: their music was/is the result of very particular social standpoint and frame of mind. Here again, an important difference is that the métier-as-birthright has a certain belittling quality, whereas the modern artist (though this actually is not true of most of them, but it is at least available to them through art should they choose to make good on it, and it is not available very many other ways at the moment) has at least chosen this uncertainty for themselves. It remains unclear, meanwhile, whether any of LeRoi's Blues People have chosen to be who he says they are. Or, if the rhetoric of choice is deemed inappropriate in such matters via one or the other of the available determinisms, there remains, still, I think, the possibility of discovering who we are, and along with it the lone certainty that there are no certainties in what we might find, regardless of the strength of our tribal affiliations. And as far as I'm concerned that is more than enough to discredit heredity as a useful source of either inner or outer identity. It is conventional to find in the tribal orientation evidence of oppressed people clinging to "all that they have." How much is this really? Not much at all; but it is more than the modern artist (again, the ideal one Jean is describing, not most of the real ones). That is a terrible thing to say while artists are still mostly monied and Black people still suffer tremendous injustices. I make no denials of or apologies for those unfortunate facts. For the moment I am interested in the psychological, the sociological, and the political; and in those respects I wonder if the so-called modern artist is not in fact a model exemplar of the race traitor, whereas the artist whose race is their Cassouian métier is not in fact trapped in a torturous, self-defeating headspace. The task for artists now, I think, and the one which I am trying to come to terms with here (now for my own sake as much as anyone else's), is to make good on this ideal of full-on uncertainty of reception. The generative potential of this mindset appeals to me, for one thing. And for another, in recent years this also has begun to seem like a good way to be everything that the typical Political Artist of my generation is not. From the department of discovering oneself, wearing politics on one's proverbial sleeve is a métier I outgrew after high school. I outgrew it in its totality before I'd had much of a chance to channel it specifically though my art. Now, emerging from the Jungian "turning of life," I am finally starting to grow into a thing or two. Specifically, most of the microsocial Problems which plague today's First World seem to me a direct product of people seeking security, or more aptly, seeking security in new and, mostly, devious ways.

In the so-called gig economy, the ways that work is offered, negotiated, accepted or declined, bartered or withheld, seem to me no less devious or calculated than the worst historical examples of union corruption; the only difference being that nonunion gig workers, now, simply have many fewer resources at their disposal. What they do have, though, are their social and (occasionally) family ties; these are often leveraged in devious ways; and this, also often, serves to intensify the chessboard aspect of everything. The saturation of all things art-and-entertainment-wise means that the mere absence of commercial imperatives does not by itself liberate an idealistic artist from having to "play the game;" in fact you must "play to play," almost no matter what you do, this on top of, perhaps, also "paying to play" in certain well-chronicled localities and scenes. Sennett Culture of the New Capitalism p. 80--"A child of privilege can afford strategic confusion, a child of the masses cannot. Chance opportunities are likely to come to the child of privilege because of family background and educational networks; privilege diminishes the need to strategize. Strong, extensive human networks allow those at the top to dwell in the present; the networks constitute a safety net which diminishes the need for long-term strategic planning. ... The mass, however, has a thinner network of informal contact and support, and so remains more institution-dependent." p. 81--"In general, the lower down in an organization, the thinner one's network, the more a person's survival requires formal strategic thinking, and formal strategic thinking requires a legible social map." This seems a bit fishy. Elsewhere the bourgeois reductionist image of the "masses" is of quite a thick network of family and community. Is the obstacle more specifically perhaps that family and community are likely of the same "mass" and hence of little use as an occupational "safety net"? The meaningful difference then would be not one of network "thickness" in and of itself, but rather of network segregation/sorting along classbound (and often also racebound) lines. And yet, if we are to grant the point as far as it goes, this last part seems important. It doesn't actually make much sense on the surface, or at least not to me reasoning anecdotally, that those "lower down in an organization" should as a rule suffer the fate of "thinner" networks. If so, mustn't agency have something to do with it too, and not just structure? I am thinking of the D. House mold, whereby personal investment is, as a matter of temperament and upbringing rather than of anything like choice, entirely in family and not at all in work. This can only beget the "thinnest" of work-based networks (this is not entirely true in his case vis-a-vis other Disney musicians, but it certainly is true vis-a-vis other Park employees), yet it would be wrong to say that he lacks thick networks altogether. Rather, he has cultivated them elsewhere than at work, and this very intentionally. connections perhaps between this issue of security and the role of the "unknown" in both Sennett's and Jorn's declarations e.g. "primary action in relation to the unknoqwn" sounds slightly scary, and probably is scary much of the time; hence the reason that many people contrive safety nets (creative/aesthetic, cultural/tribal, etc.) designed to, in these terms, create some "knowns" where the "unknown" would otherwise reign For any of us who are truly able to achieve this, the answer-in-search-of-a-question can no longer be, "It's because of their culture." Postindustrial firstworld culture is preeminently concerned with insulating us from such uncertainty as much as possible, with ethnicity a particularly visible avenue to that effect but hardly the only one. from Mark Greif's review of Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War:
Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity. The results—group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up. All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty.
To the extent that secure attachments are a basic human need, I am advocating for something which is against nature. But at that point I would hasten to point out that neither nature nor attachments are quite so monolithic as to preclude what I am describing. What is precluded, of course, is what I am describing being in any way realistic for the vast majority of people who otherwise have some inclination for art, and maybe even some talent to go along with it. Certainly I am not saying that they should not be making art. What they should not be doing, rather, is behaving badly based on their need for security. There will be so much more security for everybody once we all stop trying to hoard it for ourselves. Until then, we are the greatest threats to each other. p. 209--"Perhaps for reasons I mentioned in Chapter III, the cool timbre was much more suitable for most white musicians, who favored a "purity of sound," an artifact, rather [210] than the rawer materials of dramatic expression. [Fast forward a half-century, and the millennial usage of "drama" explains precisely why I, personally, am not at all interested in these "rawer materials" and their "dramatic" qualities.] Davis, too, for all his deep commitment to the blues, often seems to predicate his playing on the fabrication of some almost discernible object. And in this he seems closer to Bix Beiderbecke than Louis Armstrong. ... Davis himself became the most copied trumpet player of the fifties, and because of the apparent simplicity of his method, his style is even now one of the most ubiquitous in jazz." [Because of its "apparent simplicity?" Not because it was just fucking great? Really?!] p. 211--"It was the Negro's fluency with the tehnical references of Western music that made bebop (and all jazz, for that matter) possible, and it was certainly a fluency with these same superficial references of Negro music that produced, with whatever validity, the white cool style (or any jazz that white musicians played). [good lord, he has earlier (190) said "It seems to me an even more fantastic kind of sophistry that would permit a white man to give opinions on how he thinks a black man should express himself" yet here say that mere "validity" is not assured for white jazz players] What was not always attained in the case of the white jazz musician was the fluency of attitude or stance. [if this is the "Negro" "attitude or stance," then "whites" cannot achieve it; and so we can already see where the target will move to once any "whites" start acting like they have achieved it. the moving target is all very much in the spirit of Borneman's description...and if it is certainly understandable as such, it is even so not very nice.] And as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact." p. 221--"The fact that popular ragtime, Dixieland, swing, etc., were not Negro musics is important. They were the debris, in a sense, of vanished emotional references. The most contemporary Negro music to result afterward had absolutely nothing to do with this debris, except as a reaction to it. The uses to which these diluted musics put the Afro-American forms were not historical, but cultural. Negro big-band jazz of the thirties is related to the development of bebop, but neither music has much to do with commercial swing. Swing simply does not exist in the history of the development of Negro music. Each dilution was simply a phenomenon based on cultural limitations (or excess) and, as such, was only related directly to the cultural elements which provided for its existence. Fletcher Henderson was not responsible for the Ipana Troubadors, just as Charlie Parker was not responsible for Boyd Raeburn." p. 229--"There is no doubt in my mind that the techniques of European classical music can be utilized by jazz musicians, but in ways that will not subject the philosophy of Negro music to the less indigenously personal attitudes of European-derived music. Taylor and Coleman know the music of Anton Webern and are responsible to it intellectually, as they would [230] be to any stimulating art form. But they are not responsible to it emotionally, as an extra-musical catalytic form. The emotional significance of most Negro music has been its separation from the emotional and philosophical attitudes of classical music. In order for the jazz musician to utilize most expressively any formal classical techniques, it is certainly necessary that these techniques be subjected to the emotional and philosophical attitudes of Afro-American music—that these techniques be used not canonized. Most third stream jazz, it seems, has tended to canonize classical techniques rather than use them to shape the expressive fabric of a "new" jazz music. [Really? Or is it that being truly "intellectually responsible" to the European techniques is ipso facto incompatible with certain other emotional and philosophical attitudes?] The controversy over whether this music is jazz or not seems foolish and academic, since the genre does not determine the quality of the expression. However, in the case of third stream jazz the quality of the expression has been, in most cases, unimpressive. [can't really disagree with that assessment!] [230]"The "artist's life" has many definite social and historical connotations in the West. In Europe an artist or Bohemian is tolerated, even looked up to as a person of mysterious but often valuable capabilities, but in America no such admiration (nor even an analogous term of toleration) exists. The artist and his fellow-traveler, the Bohemian, are usually regarded in this society as useless con-men and as such, are treated as enemies. (If the political tone of contemporary American democracy can perhaps be too easily summed up as "anti-communist," its cultural tone, with equal vagueness, can be called "anti-artistic.") The complete domination of American society by what Brooks Adams called the economic sensibility, discouraging completely any significant participation of the imaginative sensibility in the social, political, and economic affairs of the society is what has promoted this hatred of the artist by the "average American." This phenomenon has also caused the estrangement of the American artist from American society, and made the formal culture of the society (the diluted formalism of the [231] academy) anemic and fraught with incompetence and unreality. It has also caused the high art of America to be called "an art of alienation." [Time for a new "art of alienation."] The analogy to the life of the Negro in America and his subsequent production of a high art which took its shape directly from the nature and meaning of his own alienation should be obvious. [It IS obvious on the individual level, but on the GROUP level the phenomenon of internal cohesion within "Negro" communities seems to me to threaten the validity of the point LRJ aims to make here. It is not clear to me that the archetype of the alienated Anglo-American artist or intellectual enjoyed anything comparable vis-a-vis community, or that they would want to; and if not, then this betokens a very different mindset.] This consideration (dealt with consciously or instictively) certainly reshaped certain crucial elements of the American art of the last two decades, and gave a deeply native reference to the direction of American Bohemianism, or artist's life, of the fifties. [231]"It was a lateral and reciprocal identification the young white American intellectual, artist, and Bohemian of the forties and fifties made with the Negro, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to reap some emotional benefit from the similarity of their positions in American society. In many aspects, this attempt was made even more natural and informal because the Negro music of the forties and again of the sixties (though there has been an unfailing general identification through both decades) was among the most expressive art to come out of America, and in essence, was possessed of the same aesthetic stance as the other high art of the period. "But the reciprocity of this relationship became actively decisive during the fifties when scores of young Negroes and, of course, young Negro musicians began to address themselves to the formal canons of Western nonconformity, as formally understood refusals of the hollowness of American life, especially in its address to the Negro. The young Negro intellectuals and artists in most cases are fleeing the same "classic" bourgeois situations as their white counterparts—whether the clutches of an actual black bourgeoisie or their drab philosophical reflectors who are not even to be considered a middle class economically. The important development, and I consider it a socio-historical precedent, is that many young Negroes no longer equate intelligence [232] or worth with the tepid values of the middle class, though their parents daily strive to uphold these values. The "New Negroes" produced a middle-class, middle brow art because despite their desired stance as intellectuals and artists, they were simply defending their right, the right of Negroes, to be intellectuals, in a society which patently denied them such capacities. And if the generation of the forties began to understand that no such "defense" or explanation was necessary, the young Negro intellectuals of the fifties and sixties realize—many of them perhaps only emotionally—that a society whose only strength lies in its ability to destroy itself and the rest of the world has small claim toward defining or apprciating intelligence or beauty. [fuck yeah.] Again, this address to Western nonconformity must be predicated on a fluency with, an understanding of, those canons, those attitudes; a fluency whose accomplishment is as available to analysis, and the results of this analysis as real, as the Negro's accomplishment of musical fluency with European instruments, which eventually resulted in the emergence of jazz." Cassou's artists-as-social-animals at least have the virtue of projecting their identities on a plane that is broader and more utilitarian than that of ethnicity, even if it is probably still quite exclusive in the end (that pesky class stuff again). Both orientations can be problematized from any number of angles. But dare I suggest that Riesman's riff on the circumscribed behavior of "tolerating and tolerated races" might explain why Jean's universalist métier has taken such a faux-academic beating, while LeRoi's racialist métier is mostly, well...tolerated by a whole lot of people who should know better? Another intersting point of comparison: both LeRoi and Jean (and perhaps Harry too) define somewhat relativistically and by negation. Leroi's white artifact is such because it is not corporeal; Jean's modern-art-ifact is such because it is not industrially produced, and not guaranteed acceptance. The editor of the anthology in which the Cassou essay appears explicitly compares its thesis to Lewis Mumford's; and indeed, the latter part of the above excerpt would blend right in with Art and Technics (or at least with a French translation of Art and Technics translated back into English). The direct analogies from the plastic arts to music are never quite convincing despite being endlessly suggestive. In that vein, I wonder if much of my generation of academically-trained instrumentalists has unwittingly, involuntarily effected something of a return to musical métiers "whose products are devoted to practical use" by being all but forced to play very functional commercial, popular, and folk music for $$$ while our more radical, self-actualizing works, our realizations and hypotheses, are confined to the status of side projects for as long as the world at large, as we indeed feared all along, will not know what to make of it. p. 130-131--"I think it is not fantastic to say that only in music has there been any significant Negro contribution to a formal American culture. For the most part, most of the other [131] contributions made by black Americans in the areas of painting, drama, and literature have been essentially undistinguished. The reasons for this tragic void are easy to understand if one realizes one important idea about the existence of any black culture in this country. The only Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class. Only Negro music, because, perhaps, it drew its strength and beauty out of the depths of the black man's soul, and because to a large extent its traditions could be carried on by the "lowest classes" of Negroes, has been able to survive the constant and willful dilutions of the black middle class and the persistent calls to oblivion made by the mainstream of the society." pp. 131-132--"The "coon shout" proposed one version of the American Negro and of America; Bessie Smith proposed another. ... But the point is that both these versions are accurate and informed with a legitimacy of emotional concern nowhere available in, say, what is called "Negro literature." The reason is as terrifying as it is simple. The middle-class black man, whether he wanted to be a writer, or a painter, or a doctor, developed an emotional allegiance to the middle-class (middle-brow) culture of America that obscured, or actually made hideous, any influences or psychological awareness that seemed to come from outside [132] what was generally acceptable to a middle-class white man, especially if those influences were identifiable as coming from the most despised group in the country. The black middle class wanted no subculture, nothing that could connect them with the poor black man or the slave. "Literature, for most Negro writers, for instance, was always an example of "culture," in the narrow sense of "cultivation" or "sophistication" in an individual within their own group. The Negro artist, because of his middle-class background, carried an artificial social burden as the "best and most intelligent" of Negroes, and usually entered into the "serious" arts to exhibit his social graces—as a method, or means, of displaying his participation in the serious aspects of Western culture. To be a writer was to be "cultivated," in the stunted bougeois sense of the word. It was also to be a "quality" black man, not merely an "ordinary n-----." Despite his aesthetic and political agendas being quite different than Jean's, I wonder if Jean's rapturous meditation on the métier does not in fact pass through many of the best rejoinders to LeRoi's separatism. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= COMMENTS =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ========== (i) Sennett's Graffitti http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/bodies-and-artifacts-isennetts-graffiti.html ========== John Berger The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) "Picasso is not famous as Millet in France or Millais in England were famous eighty years ago. They were famous because two or three of their paintings were made popular and reproductions of these pictures hung in millions of homes. The titles of the paintings...were far better known than the name of the painter. Today...not more than one out of every hundred who know the name of Picasso would be able to recognize a single picture by him. "The only other artist the extent of whose fame is comparable with Picasso's is Charlie Chaplin. But Chaplin, like the nineteenth-century painter, became famous because of the popularity of his work. ... In Chaplin's case, the artist — or rather his art — has counted for more than the man. In Picasso's case the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade." (p. 6) "Picasso is fascinated by and devoted to his own creativity. What he creates — the finished product — is almost incidental. ... For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does." (p. 9) "one has only to read those who...died before such success came, to realize how fundamental to this generation was their conviction that it is what the artist does that counts. ... ... Picasso is the exception. ‘It's not what the artist does that counts but what he is.’ We have here the first indication of Picasso's historical ambiguity. He is the most famous painter in the world and his fame rests upon his modernity. ... And yet in his attitude to art and to his own destiny as an artist there is a bias which is not in the least modern and which belongs more properly to the beginning of the nineteenth century." (p. 13) (more)