The Ellington Century is not a biography of Duke Ellington. It is not a history of jazz. It is something altogether more ambitious: an attempt at a wholesale reorientation of the way we think about twentieth-century music. Traditional musicology proceeds largely under the assumption that genres (“classical music,” “popular music,” jazz, not to mention non-Western musics) exist in different worlds, each treated as if separate from the others. When jazz figures in studies of Western art music — as it often does in discussions of composers like Ravel or Milhaud — it is generally acknowledged only as an authorless, undifferentiated flavouring. Surveys of modernism are particularly afflicted with this malaise. Though many of modernism’s most canonical figures resided for much of their lives in America, including Schoenberg (a long-time tennis partner to George Gershwin) and Stravinsky, scholars tend to approach them from a staunchly European perspective. Ellington, though far from the only composer discussed in the book, functions here as a lens through which to view the twentieth century from a new perspective, and, ultimately, as a means of forging a new conception of ‘modern music’. READ MORE
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| The Ellington Century A work of music criticism by David Schiff University of California Press, 2012 336 pages Reviewed by Caroline Waight |
