{"id":2035,"date":"2010-09-22T16:45:30","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T15:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2010-09-22T20:19:20","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T19:19:20","slug":"jazz-into-classical-will-go%e2%80%a6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/2010\/09\/22\/jazz-into-classical-will-go%e2%80%a6\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz into Classical will go\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like an aberrant relative of whom one is slightly wary and mistrustful, jazz has always occupied a slightly equivocal place in relation to the classical music tradition. Briefly adored by Les Six<\/em> and the aspiring avant-garde in early twentieth-century France, it has never quite managed to find itself a comfortable place in the canon of Western classical music.<\/p>\n

\"George
Feeling blue: Gershwin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the start of the twentieth-century, composers working in France were seized with enthusiasm for the latest craze, jazz, with printed sheet music of works by Scott Joplin and performances by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra fuelling the interests of composers such as Satie and the group, Les Six<\/em>. Joplin’s opera Treemonisha<\/a> ,<\/em>written back in 1910 (although not\u00a0performed in full realisation\u00a0until over sixty years later), and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess <\/em>from 1935, both show established classical forms embracing jazz: indeed, although famed for pieces such as the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and other ragtime piano works, Joplin always referred to his piece as an ‘opera.’<\/p>\n

Evidence of the enthusiasm for jazz can be found in the adoption of ragtime music, as in Stravinsky\u2019s Ragtime<\/a><\/em>; or from Satie\u2019s Parade<\/a><\/em>; although, as always with Stravinsky, you get the sense that Stravinsky is playing with jazz as an objective phenomenon, rather than as a visceral, gut-instinct style; he dissects it and plays with it from a distance, somehow, rather than it being the lifeblood of his writing. Antheil\u2019s A Jazz Symphony<\/em> saw jazz invading orchestral music in 1925.<\/p>\n