Searching for the Center of a Sound: Bill Dixon's Webern, the Unaccompanied Solo, and Compositional Ontology in Post‐Songform Jazz

Abstract

The solo has been a crucial element of jazz throughout this tradition's development. Unaccompanied solo works by single‐line instruments, however, have a more recent lineage. Saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton's 1968 For Alto was the first full‐length album of unaccompanied solos. The 1970s brought a plethora of solo recordings from an ever‐increasing number of artists, many in the vanguard stream of the music. This aesthetic development brought with it a number of issues to consider. In the absence of a score or standardized repertoire, as is often the case in this genre, what gives a composition its identity? What are the ontological implications of music that deviates from cyclical harmonic structures and the theme‐and‐variations format? This article examines aspects of these issues through a close look at both the unique compositional processes of trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon, and his unaccompanied solo trumpet piece, “Webern.” Based on extensive interviews with Dixon, I explore three performances of Dixon's composition, none of which sonically resemble one another. If the sounding result of a composition is not its central identity, how does one examine or define such a work? The problems in locating an essence or “center” of non‐notated music, and how to analyze and represent it, are not specific to Dixon's work, they are major issues that have limited the amount of scholarship that has focused on this approach to music‐making.

Notes

¹ Bill Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004, Bennington, VT.

² Dixon, quoted in “Going to the Center,” dir. Robert O'Haire, included in Bill Dixon, Tapestries for Small Orchestra, Firehouse 12 Records, FH12‐04‐03‐008, 2008, compact‐disc/DVD set.

³ I use the term “post‐songform jazz” here to encompass music that is considered to be a composition by the artist. As the term suggests, such a work must employ a formal structure or style that is not based on cyclical harmonic structures or a theme and variations format. Despite the problematic temporal marker “post” with its (in this case) unintended evolutionary connotations, this seems to be a workable solution to describe the music I engage with here.

⁴ See, for example, José Bowen, “The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and Its Role in the Relation Between Musical Works and Their Performances,” The Journal of Musicology 11 (Spring 1993): 139–173, and James O. Young and Carl Matheson, “Metaphysics of Jazz,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (Spring 2000): 125–133. Bowen's article examines two performances of “'Round Midnight” in which one “retains only the melody and key of the ‘parent’” (i.e., the 1944 tune credited to Cootie Williams, Thelonious Monk, and Bernie Hanighen) and the other “only the harmony and the rhythm” (Bowen, 145). Bowen concludes that although any number of performances of the tune may share a variety of characteristics—including having nothing in common—“finding the tune in ‘'Round Midnight’ is impossible” because its essential qualities are always under negotiation as the performance traditions of the work continually evolve over time (Bowen, 167).

⁵ Young and Matheson, “Metaphysics of Jazz,” 131.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Michael David Székely, “Thresholds, Jazz, Improvisation, Heterogeneity, and Politics in Postmodernity,” Jazz Perspectives 2 (2008): 42.

⁸ Steven Pond, for example, has called attention to the importance of timbre as a consistent and pan‐stylistic historical tradition in jazz, particularly during the broad explorations of the 1960s and beyond. Pond argues that “the failure to notice timbre in our historical narratives speaks volumes about what counts as musically significant.” Steven F. Pond, quoted from the abstract of his paper, “Silencing Sound: Jazz Historiography and the Sixties,” presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 15–16, 2006.

⁹ George Lewis, review of Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, in Journal of the Society for American Music 3 (August 2009): 369.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ I have written at length elsewhere on Dixon's changing conception of “black music” throughout his six‐plus‐decade career. See Andrew Raffo Dewar, “‘This Is an American Music’: Aesthetics, Music and Visual Art of Bill Dixon” (M.A. thesis, Wesleyan University, 2004).

¹² Lewis has rightly criticized the double standard applied to black experimentalists. He notes that “musicians of other ethnicities have historically been free to migrate conceptually and artistically without suffering charges of rejecting their culture and history.” In this argument, Lewis cites such composers as Earle Brown, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley (as well as others), who “were able to describe themselves without opposition as ‘former’ jazz musicians.” George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xli.

¹³ That said, another author has found additional intersections between Stockhausen and the jazz art world. See Barry Bergstein, “Miles Davis and Karlheinz Stockhausen: A Reciprocal Relationship,” The Musical Quarterly 76 (Winter 1992): 502–525.

¹⁴ Jeff Schwartz has used the term “non‐song form improvisation” to describe jazz that employs open forms in the solo sections of performances. I distinguish the music I describe here from the music covered by Schwartz's term because it not only forgoes cyclical structures but it also functions outside the theme‐and‐variations format. See Jeff Schwartz, “New Black Music: Amiri Baraka and Jazz, 1959–1965” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 2004).

¹⁵ One example is Teddy Charles's 1953 “Nocturne,” which Ira Gitler described at the time as “not a jazz piece.” Ira Gitler, liner notes for Teddy Charles Quartet, New Directions, Prestige 143, 1953, 10‐inch LP. Guiffre's 1958 multi‐part “Western Suite” also employs a post‐songform compositional approach. See Jimmy Giuffre, Western Suite, Atlantic LP1330, 1959, LP. Maneri and his colleagues supposedly experimented with a variety of post‐songform compositional approaches as early as the mid‐1940s. See Harvey Pekar, liner notes to Joe Maneri, Paniots Nine, Avant AVAN067, 1998, compact disc.

¹⁶ See, for example: Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (1975; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1994); Michael J. Budds, Jazz in the Sixties (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990); Jane Martha Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell and Cecil Taylor” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996); and Eric Charry, “Freedom and Form in Ornette Coleman's Early Atlantic Recordings,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 9 (1997): 261–94.

¹⁷ See, for example: A.B. Spellman, Four Jazz Lives (1966; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Benjamin Looker, The Point from Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists' Group of St. Louis (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004); Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz and Community Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself.

¹⁸ Paul Berliner's work on the aesthetics, pedagogy, and practice of jazz improvisation, Ingrid Monson's monograph on the aesthetics of improvisational interaction, Eric Porter's extensive use of musicians' own thoughts on the aesthetics of their music, and Paul Austerlitz's exploration of drummer Milford Graves's aesthetics are notable exceptions, though Berliner and Monson for the most part do not discuss the more outré forms of the tradition that abandoned song forms. Derek Bailey's cross‐genre examination of improvisation, and Ed Sarath's study of temporality and the phenomenology of improvisation are other isolated examples that make aesthetics their focus. See Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1980); Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ed Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” Journal of Music Theory 40 (Spring 1996): 1–38; Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2002); and Paul Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).

¹⁹ Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 163.

²⁰ For basic biographical information on Bill Dixon's life and work, see Ben Young, Dixonia: A Bio‐Discography of Bill Dixon (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998) and Andrew Raffo Dewar with Bill Dixon, Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians Online, s.v. “Bill Dixon,” http://www.jazz.com/encyclopedia/dixon-bill-william-robert (accessed December 4, 2009).

²¹ “67 at United Nations Find Jazz a Common Language,” New York Times, May 23, 1959, p. 4.

²² “U.N. Cats Dig Jazz,” New York Times, June 12, 1960, p. 288.

²³ For more on the October Revolution and the Jazz Composer's Guild, see: Christopher Bakridges, “The October Revolution in Jazz: Critical Reception of the New Thing” (M.A. thesis, Wesleyan University, 1995); Michael C. Heller, “‘So We Did It Ourselves’: A Social and Musical History of Musician‐Organized Jazz Festivals from 1960 to 1973” (M.A. thesis, Rutgers University Newark, 2005); and Benjamin Piekut, “Race, Community, and Conflict in the Jazz Composer's Guild,” Jazz Perspectives 3 (December 2009): 191–231. Piekut has critically reexamined the Jazz Composer's Guild with illuminating new interviews and impeccable historical scholarship.

²⁶ Steve Lacy, quoted in Bailey, Improvisation, 141.

²⁴ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁷ Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” 31.

²⁸ Bill Dixon, email correspondence with the author, March 24, 2004.

²⁹ This is dependent upon context, however. In Dixon's ensemble and orchestral works there are different processes and techniques involved. For example, in an orchestral work like Quinacridone (1987), a through‐composed score was used because it was performed by a traditional orchestra that did not have improvisational experience.

³⁰ Bill Dixon, email correspondence with the author, October 23, 2009.

³¹ Bill Dixon, “Thoughts,” The Daily Cardinal, March 20, 1972, p. 4.

³² Bailey, Improvisation, 140.

³⁴ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

³³ Stephen Blum, “Composition,” Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06216 (accessed December 4, 2009).

³⁵ Blum, “Composition.”

³⁶ Bruno Nettl, et al., “Improvisation,” Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13738 (accessed December 4, 2009).

³⁷ Bill Dixon, quoted in Frank Rubolino, “Bill Dixon: The ‘One Final Note’ Interview,” http://www.onefinalnote.com/features/2002/dixon/ (accessed March 15, 2004).

³⁸ Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 492.

³⁹ Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” 5.

⁴⁰ George E. Lewis, “Interacting with Latter‐Day Musical Automata,” Contemporary Music Review 18 (Part 3): 99–112, 105.

⁴² Karlheinz Stockhausen, quoted in Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), 201.

⁴¹ Stockhausen first employed such techniques in his Kontakte (1960).

⁴³ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980; repr., New York: Continuum, 2004). Deleuze and Guattari define arborescent modes as the traditional linear “family tree” approach to organization that incorporates a “set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points.” Rhizomes, on the other hand, “connect any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature.” Rhizomes are therefore “composed not of units but of … directions in motion.” Ibid., 21.

⁴⁴ Bill Dixon, quoted in Graham Lock, “Man with a Trumpet,” liner notes for Bill Dixon, Odyssey, Archive Editions 510–1925 I, 2001, compact disc.

⁴⁵ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁴⁶ Bill Dixon, L'Opera, vol. 1 (North Bennington, VT: Metamorphosis Music, 1986), 161.

⁴⁷ There is also the possibility that Italian saxophonist/composer Giuseppe Cattafesta's “Lamento” from 1931 was the first unaccompanied recording of a single‐line instrument in jazz. This recording, a grammophone test, has unfortunately been lost. For more on this, see Adriano Mazzoletti, Il Jazz en Italia: Dalle Origine al Doppoguerra (Rome: Laterza, 1983), 503. In addition, there is a contentious 1940 solo recording of Charlie Parker playing two standards (“Honeysuckle Rose” and “Body and Soul”), but as Tom Guralnick has noted, “the recordings are of mysterious origin and technically poor recording quality. It has been suggested that they were probably made on a small ‘make‐your‐own‐record’ arrangement at an amusement park in his hometown of Kansas City, MO, or in a high school auditorium when Parker was 18 years old.” Tom Guralnick, Contemporary Improvised Solo Saxophone Performance and Recording Activity (M.A. thesis, Wesleyan University, 1987), 25.

⁵⁰ Bill Dixon, email correspondence with the author, April 11, 2004.

⁴⁸ Guiffre's “So Low,” for example, incorporates the sound of his tapping foot. See Jimmy Giuffre, The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet, Atlantic LP1238, 1956, LP.

⁴⁹ Bill Dixon, interview by the author, March 1, 2004, Bennington, VT.

⁵¹ This observation is based on the performance recorded in 1963 and released as Eric Dolphy, The Illinois Concert, Blue Note 99826, 1999, compact disc.

⁵² Takes 5 and 8 of these solos were posthumously released on Don Ellis, Out of Nowhere, Candid CCD‐79032, 1989, compact disc.

⁵³ Jimmy Giuffre, liner notes to Free Fall, Columbia CS8764, 1963; reissued as Columbia CK65446, 1998, compact disc.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Anthony Braxton, quoted in Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (New York: Da Capo Books, 1989), 50.

⁵⁵ The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. See Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself.

⁵⁶ These solos were originally released on side A of the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, Congliptious, Nessa N‐2, 1968, LP.

⁵⁸ Early in his career, Dixon assisted Russell as a copyist.

⁵⁹ Bill Dixon, Considerations 2, Fore Records 5, 1980, LP.

⁶⁰ Dixon was later involved in a legal battle with Bob Rusch of Cadence Jazz Records over Rusch's unauthorized CD re‐release of the limited edition LP set, Collection, of which a performance of “Webern Work/Study” was a part. See Bill Dixon, Collection, Cadence Jazz Records CJR1024/1025, 1985, LP. Although Dixon did not win the case, he reissued the contents of CJR's Collection on Bill Dixon, Odyssey.

⁶¹ Bill Dixon, November 1981, Soul Note 1037/1038, 1982, LP.

⁶² Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶³ In Dixonia, Ben Young delineates no less than seven performances of the work from 1973 through 1984, with a total of six possible recordings. Unfortunately, at this point it seems that only the three commercially released recordings of “Webern” survive. Young's Dixonia lists three other possible recordings of “Webern,” but according to Bill Dixon, these have not been located (Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004). At some point, these recordings may come to light. The three in question are from late May 1973 at Bennington College, Vermont, June 26, 1982, at the Ferrari Gallery in Verona, Italy, which was filmed by a Roman filmmaker, and a June 2, 1984 performance at the Sound Unity Festival in New York City (Young, Dixonia, 187, 262, 270).

⁶⁴ Dixon, interview with the author, February 22, 2004.

⁶⁶ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004. Dixon's longtime colleague, pianist/composer Cecil Taylor, has also discussed the idea of the soloist as orchestra when describing his relationship to the piano, an aesthetic he attributes to the influence of Duke Ellington on his work. See Spellman, Four Jazz Lives, 72.

⁶⁷ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁶⁸ Cecil Taylor, quoted in Spellman, Four Jazz Lives, 38.

⁶⁹ See Alfred Blatter, Instrumentation and Orchestration, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Schirmer Thomson Learning, 1997), 160.

⁷⁰ This perceived acceleration could be considered illusory if we accept the phenomena Ekkehard Jost says “cause a subjective feeling of tempo in free jazz” (Jost, Free Jazz, 72). The first is “the relative density of impulse series,” by which is meant “the frequency of musical impulses per time unit” (ibid., 73). Jost argues that high‐density impulse series create “the impression of different tempi” (ibid.). Using these analytical tools, the perceived acceleration in “Webern” could simply be a result of a multiplying of sound events, such as those that occur after the 34” mark in “Work/Study,” and the smaller phrase units that Dixon uses after that point to articulate denser figures.

⁷¹ Jimmy Stewart's analysis of the 1981 “Webern” performance employs a traditional analytical mindset, stating that the performance is about “explicating a B7Aug11th chord.” Stewart's analysis, a valid effort limited by the constraints of the liner note genre and conducted without the benefit of an interview with Dixon, runs contrary to Dixon's description of the composition. See Jimmy Stewart, liner notes for Bill Dixon, November 1981.

⁷² Anthony Braxton quoted in Lock, Forces in Motion, 120.

⁷³ In Braxton's case, many of his solo works are constructed using his modular “language music” system. This system arranges his sound world into twelve basic components, such as “long sound,” “trill,” “short attacks,” and so on. To generate a new solo work, Braxton may create the form of a work by combining a number of these language types in various ways (e.g., multi‐layering, sequential ordering, one language type nested within another, and any number of other possibilities). This creates a formal identity for each composition, with the specific content to be supplied in the course of performance.

⁷⁴ Braxton, quoted in Lock, Forces in Motion, 121.

⁷⁵ Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, Nessa 9, 2008 (orig. 1977), compact disc.

⁷⁶ Evan Rapport, “Roscoe Mitchell: Innovations in Composition and Performance Strategies,” paper presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting, Wesleyan University, October 2008.

⁷⁷ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁸⁰ Dixon, email correspondence with the author, October 23, 2009.

⁷⁸ Dixon has also discussed his strong interest in the compositions of Elliott Carter, especially the string quartets, which he has said he could “listen to all day” (personal communication with the author).

⁷⁹ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Gabriel Solis rightly criticizes both Lydia Goehr's contention that jazz musicians who adopt werktreue beliefs are victims of “conceptual imperialism,” and her belief that the authenticity of these concepts in the jazz tradition is suspect. See Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk's Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958,” Ethnomusicology 48 (Fall 2004): 334–35, and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 249–253. Solis's use of Molefi Kete Asante's work is also notable for its attempt to root out the differing work concepts in jazz through Asante's reading of Janheinz Jahn's work on African diasporic expressive culture. Quoting Jahn, Asante suggests that African diasporic culture is a performance‐based culture versus a textual culture. See Solis, “A Unique Chunk,” 335; Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 62; and Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: African Culture and the Western World (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 174. Both Goehr's and Solis's somewhat essentialist expositions, however, do not take into account artists such as Dixon, Braxton, or Taylor, whose work is a result of what Braxton has called “composite reality,” or the intercultural zones of mutual inspiration and discovery. Both Dixon and Braxton have long drawn actively and extensively from “European” musical concepts, and they have done so not as victims of conceptual imperialism, nor as African Americans, but as musicians, composers, and artists.

⁸³ Spellman, Four Jazz Lives, 28.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ This is of course too large an issue to engage with in depth here. For more on these problematic boundaries, frictions, and factions in experimental musics post‐1950, see George Lewis's now‐classic construction of the “Afrological” and “eurological” in “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (1996), repr. in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, eds. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 131–172; Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Lewis, Power Stronger (particularly his discussion of Joseph Jarman's intersections with composer John Cage); and Mike Heffley, Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) on the complex relationship between European and American jazz.

⁸⁶ Radano, New Musical Figurations, 235.

⁸⁷ See Andrew Raffo Dewar, “‘This Is an American Music’: Aesthetics, Music and Visual Art of Bill Dixon” (M.A. thesis, Wesleyan University, 2004), and Bill Dixon, as quoted in “Black Music: An Interview with Bill Dixon,” Quadrille 10 (Fall 1975): 6.

⁸⁸ For more on this topic, see Christopher Hardin, “Black Professional Musicians in Higher Education: A Study Based on In‐Depth Interviews” (Ed.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1987). Hardin's work is based on extensive interviews with a number of jazz artists who took positions in academia.

⁸⁹ Bill Dixon, liner notes for Dixon, Collection, 4.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁹² Bill Dixon, liner notes to Bill Dixon Orchestra, Intents and Purposes, RCA‐Victor LSP‐3844, 1967, LP.

⁹³ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Dixon, email correspondence with the author, October 23, 2009. All of the compositions Dixon mentions in this quotation are available on Dixon, Odyssey.

⁹⁶ Dixon, liner notes, Collection, 3.

⁹⁷ Mike Heffley, “Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Identity, Improvisation and Idiom in Free Music Production” (Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University, 2000), 1336.

⁹⁸ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

⁹⁹ Travis Jackson, “Performance and Musical Meaning: Analyzing Jazz on the New York Scene” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998), 155.

¹⁰⁰ Dixon, liner notes, Collection, 4–5.

¹⁰¹ Bill Dixon, quoted in Keith Thompson, “The Idea of the Solo: Bill Dixon's Work in Progress” Avant 20 (Autumn 2001). Available online at http://www.bill-dixon.com/reviews/thompson_avant.html (accessed February 8, 2010).

¹⁰² Dixon, quoted in Young, Dixonia, 79.

¹⁰³ See Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, 134–162, and Solis, “A Unique Chunk.”

¹⁰⁴ Dixon, quoted in Rubolino, “The One Final Note Interview.”

¹⁰⁵ John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra (Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1997), 187. Of course, by 1968, Miles Davis had also begun to experiment with tape delay, reverberation, wah‐wah pedals, and other electronic effects to alter the timbre of his trumpet. The delay and reverb used by Sun Ra on the LP Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow was reportedly created by running a cable from the output jack of the recorder back into the input and using the volume of the output playback to “control the effect, make it fast or slow.” Ibid., 187.

¹⁰⁶ Dixon, interview by the author, February 22, 2004.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid. Also see references in Young, Dixonia.

¹⁰⁸ An earlier version of this study goes into much more “traditional” musicological analysis of each performance, including an attempt at graphic transcription of the works. Due to the fact that this type of analysis seems outmoded and perhaps even irrelevant for this music, I have eliminated those elements in this current iteration of the study. See Dewar, “This Is an American Music.”

¹⁰⁹ See, for example: Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity (1966; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); James Anderson, “Musical Identity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40 (Spring 1982): 285–291; Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Jean‐Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); John A. Fisher, “Discovery, Creation, and Musical Works,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (Spring 1991): 129–136; Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; and Leo Treitler, “History and the Ontology of the Musical Work,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (Summer 1993): 483–497.

¹¹⁰ See, for example: Jo Ellen Jacobs, “Identifying Musical Works of Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 24 (1990): 75–85; Bowen, “History of Remembered Innovation”; Lee B. Brown, “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (Autumn 1996): 353–369; Young and Matheson, “Metaphysics of Jazz”; and Solis, “A Unique Chunk.”

¹¹¹ Young and Matheson's “Metaphysics of Jazz” does mention the early work of Ornette Coleman, but that music, according to Eric Charry's investigations, still contains repeating structures that, to some degree, function cyclically. See Charry, “Freedom and Form.”

¹¹² John Cage, Fontana Mix (New York: Henmar Press, 1960).

¹¹³ Dixon's thoughts on the prospect of others performing “Webern” are both enigmatic and enlightening: “Sound is a universe in itself and while for some things a ‘selection’ of what that sound is can be put into play … [A] performance of Webern, as an authentic replication of my performance, if that is what the performer is striving to do, will not be a possibility. The notation [I believe Dixon means transcription here], for the uninitiated, will not reveal that much. If you have not heard me do the performance, notation will also not inform you that much. … Whatever you play there will be, due to the laws of performance nature, at least to my ear, something of value, something that quite possibly could, with care, understanding and technical alteration, be made into a kind of reflection of the ideas that are ‘Webern.’ To learn the piece, if it were me, I would break it down into exercises for myself that would cover intervals [the wide intervals], the pedal tones, and the alteration or the colouration of the tones that make up the stratas in use.” Dixon, email correspondence with the author, October 23, 2009.

¹¹⁵ Cecil Taylor, quoted in “1964 Cecil Taylor Panel Discussion: ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’,” http://www.mattweston.com/cecilpanel.html (accessed December 5, 2009). Mackey states that in African‐American expressive practice, “the privileging of the verb, the movement from noun to verb, linguistically accentuates action.” Ibid., 79.

¹¹⁴ Again, I reiterate that Dixon does often use standard musical notation, though not in the solo context that “Webern” exists within.

¹¹⁶ Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb.”

¹¹⁷ Fred Moten, In the Break: Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 55.

¹¹⁸ Wadada Leo Smith, Notes (8 Pieces) | Source | A New | World | Music: Creative Music (New Haven, CT: self‐published, 1973), 19.

¹¹⁹ Wadada Leo Smith, “An Ankhrasmation Analysis: Anthony Braxton's Composition 113,” in Mixtery: A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton, ed. Graham Lock (Devon: Stride Publications, 1995), 97.

¹²⁰ Henry Martin's Schenkerian analytical study of Charlie Parker's work is also noteworthy for its unique application of the technique to jazz. Smith's approach is a much more individualized approach and only marginally conforms to traditional Schenkerian analysis techniques. See Henry Martin, Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation (Newark, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1996).

¹²¹ See Joseph Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art?: Lectures in the Philosophy of Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976).

¹²² Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art?

¹²³ Goodman, Languages of Art.

¹²⁴ See Eco, The Open Work, and Ingarden, The Work of Music.

¹²⁵ Nattiez's reading of Ingarden's theories is that the “being” or ontology of a musical work cannot be reduced to “a given performance (since the score determines different potential performances); the here‐and‐now perception of a work (since each listener hears it differently); the acoustic reality (since the work's temporal profile and formal configuration are not, strictly speaking, sonorous elements; or the score (since the work will always and everywhere transcend that score).” Nattiez, Music and Discourse, 69.

¹²⁶ Ibid.

¹²⁷ Eco, The Open Work, 4. Eco cites Henri Pousseur, “La nuova sensibilitá musicale,” Incontri Musicali 2 (May 1958): 25.

¹²⁸ Moten, In the Break, 55.

¹²⁹ Ibid.

¹³⁰ Dixon, email correspondence with the author, October 23, 2009.