Storytelling in Jazz and Musicality in Theatre

Through the Mirror

Sven Bjerstedt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138312968
• eBook ISBN: 9780429856068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Art forms tend to mirror themselves in each other. In order to understand literature and fine arts better, we often turn to music, speaking of the 'tone' in a book and of the 'rhythm' in a painting. In attempts to understand music better, we turn instead to the narrative arts, speaking of the 'story' of a musical piece. This book focuses on two examples of such conceptual mirror reflexivity: narrativity in jazz music and musicality in spoken theatre. These intermedial metaphors are shown to be significant to the practice and reflection of performing artists through their ability to mediate holistic views of what is considered to be of crucial importance in artistic practice, analysis, and education. This exploration opens up possibilities for new theoretical and practical insights with regard to how the borderland between temporal art forms can be conceptualized. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of music and theatre, but also to those who work in the fields of aesthetics, intermedial studies, cognitive linguistics, arts theory, communication theory, and cultural studies.

Part I

Intermedial metaphor in the arts

1Metaphoricity in arts discourse

In his opening speech at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, Dr Martin Luther King spoke of the storytelling capacity of jazz musicians:

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new sense of hope or triumph. This is triumphant music.

Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone toward all of these.

Hundreds of years before that, William Shakespeare spoke – repeatedly, as in the beginning of the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice – of the necessity of musical capacity in humans, not least actors:

Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage,

But music for the time doth change his nature,

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.

The arts constantly invent metaphors. In a sense, that is what they are about. They do it not only with regard to the world we live in, but to a significant extent also with regard to the arts themselves, and with regard to artistic practice.

For a long time I have found two such metaphors particularly interesting: at the same time, both compelling and puzzling. One of them borrows a concept from music to describe what is said to matter on the theatrical stage: an actor in spoken theatre is supposed to act with ‘musicality’. The other one goes the other way around, borrowing a concept from the narrative arts to describe an allegedly crucial property of music: an improvising jazz instrumentalist is supposed to ‘tell stories’. These conceptual loans have been around for quite a while. John Keats praised Edmund Kean’s acting because of his ‘music of elocution’ (Keats, 1817/1970, p. 229). In the early days of jazz, Lester Young favoured Frank Trumbauer’s saxophone playing because he ‘always told a little story’ (Daniels, 2002, p. 101). The same metaphors still permeate the fields of spoken theatre and jazz improvisation – long-lived, widespread and paradoxical enough to warrant some reflection.

That is my reason for writing this book. Its main title is Storytelling in Jazz and Musicality in Theatre. The work is an attempt to explore as fully as possible the significance of these words, perceived as conceptual loans between the arts. I will try to attain a deeper understanding of what storytelling may mean in the field of instrumental jazz improvisation and what musicality may mean in the field of spoken theatre. Taken at face value, the concepts may perhaps seem self-contradictory: how could stories be told in a context where no words are available, and how could musicality be of importance in a context where there is no music?

Nevertheless, the terms ‘storytelling’ and ‘musicality’ have a long history of prominence in descriptive and prescriptive talk on jazz improvisation and spoken theatre, respectively. I will study the meanings ascribed to them by way of interviews with Swedish jazz and theatre practitioners. How do they view and use these concepts in connection with their respective crafts? Their perspectives will be analysed and discussed in the light of writings on jazz and theatre, on narrativity, on musicality, on metaphor, as well as on educational and sociological issues. In brief, then, this is an exploratory study.

The investigation may be viewed from different perspectives. From one viewpoint, I as a researcher have collected and analysed empirical data regarding performing artists’ views on storytelling in jazz improvisation and on musicality in spoken theatre. From another perspective, these performers are all artistic researchers in their own right; they have presented their results to me, and my contribution to the study is, rather, on a meta-analytical level.

Die Metapher ist weit klüger als ihr Verfasser. These words by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Lichtenberg, 1967, p. 512) certainly apply to this investigation: the metaphor is much wiser, richer and more interesting than its interpreter, too. In this book, I try on a number of theoretical and methodological glasses in order to take a good look at the metaphors in question. In the end, though, the eyes peeping through these glasses are inevitably mine. My own experiences tinge the study. For many years I have pursued parallel careers as a performing jazz pianist – hopefully telling some stories with my music – and as a music teacher at Malmö Theatre Academy, Sweden – hopefully making some sense to the acting stude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Part I: Intermedial metaphor in the arts
• Part II: Musical storytelling
• Part III: Theatrical musicality
• Part IV: Through the mirror
• Index