Quotation and reference in jazz performance: Ella Fitzgerald's "St. Louis Blues," 1957-1979.
Item
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Title
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Quotation and reference in jazz performance: Ella Fitzgerald's "St. Louis Blues," 1957-1979.
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Identifier
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AAI9830690
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identifier
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9830690
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Creator
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Cartwright, Katharine.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Blum
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music
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Abstract
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Ella Fitzgerald (1917-96) once declared, "I steal everything I ever heard." Tommy Flanagan, who worked with her for years, calls her "one of the biggest quoters of all time." The dissertation speaks to several issues concerning her borrowings and references: What do her interpolations reveal about her musical conception? What do they tell us about who and what she listened to? How does she invoke her sources? How does she adapt bits of borrowed material and weave them into her improvisations?;The study places interpolation in her practice within the context of quotation and reference in jazz performance as it is understood by musicians. The project focuses on seven of her versions of W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues," and includes seventy-two musical transcriptions from her recordings and other sources.;Chapter One, "'Improvising the Past': Quotation, Interpolation and Reference in Jazz Performance," summarizes the author's conversations with members of the jazz community on the subject of quotation. They reveal aesthetic issues that arise and myriad types of quotation and interpolation that are recognized and used.;Chapter Two, "'Long, Deep, and Wide': 'St. Louis Blues' and Text Borrowing," looks at texted references. Like traditional blues singers who have performed the piece, Fitzgerald includes stanzas not written by the composer along with Handy's verses, creating her blues persona and arrangements by combining couplets from various sources, including classic/Vaudeville-blues and downhome/folk-blues repertoires.;Chapter Three, "'Guess These People Wonder What I'm Singing': The 1958 Birthday Concert," examines sources of thirteen quotations Fitzgerald interpolated in one fifteen-chorus scat solo.;Chapter Four, "Paraphrasing and Reworking Source Materials," focuses on the musical substance of each of the quotations discussed in Chapters Two and Three, summarizes her techniques of paraphrase and restatement, and looks at interpolation as an improvisational/compositional strategy in her work.;Chapter Five, "'Passing Things Along': Quotation and Fitzgerald's 'Royal Ancestry'," addresses issues raised in earlier chapters and in other writings on Fitzgerald's work and on referentiality in jazz and other African-American idioms.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
