Jazz, Dissonance, Resolution: reflections on the place of music theory in New Jazz Studies research by Tony Whyton
This paper explores the uneasy place of music theory within New Jazz Studies scholarship since the emergence of the field over 30 years ago. Arguably, the cross-disciplinary nature of New Jazz Studies has led to a dominance of social, cultural and political readings of jazz, and music theory and textual analysis have often been treated as unwelcome remnants of the outmoded practices of formalist musicology that continue to privilege and promote ideas of the ‘music itself’.
This paper explores the dissonances at play within field, covering from Mark Tucker’s musicological critique of Krin Gabbard’s field defining volumes Jazz Among the Discourses and Representing Jazz (Duke University Press, 1995) to Mark Gridley’s 2007 article ‘Misconceptions in Linking Free Jazz with the Civil Rights Movement’, which was constructed as a direct response to New Jazz Studies scholarship, uncoupling jazz theory from its social and political context in order to focus on the content of ‘the music itself’ in abstraction. Given my background as a trained musician-composer and subsequent career as a cultural musicologist, I also reflect on the uneasy place of music theory, analysis and textual readings of jazz in my own Beyond A Love Supreme (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Taking inspiration from Barbara Bleij’s recent doctoral thesis, I offer suggestions for future research, and potential resolutions, where the domains of New Jazz Studies, music theory and analysis, and jazz practice can converge. Returning to John Coltrane, I conclude with a compelling example of how forms of tonal and post-tonal analysis can disrupt existing social, cultural and political interpretations of jazz.
Tony Whyton
Tony Whyton is Professor of Jazz Studies at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University UK. He is the author of Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (Oxford University Press, 2013), and the co-editor of Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (Routledge 2018). He continues to work as the co-editor of the Routledge monograph series ‘Transnational Studies in Jazz’, which now includes over 20 titles since its launch in 2015. Over the past 15 years, Whyton has led several European research projects and Knowledge Exchange initiatives including the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA)-funded Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities project (2010-2013) and the JPI Heritage Plus research programme, Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals - CHIME (2015-2018). From 2017-2023, Whyton worked as a Knowledge Exchange Fellow for HERA.