Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Ellington, Duke (1899-1974) – Concerts »

AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

L'œuvre de Edward “Duke” Ellington est à la fois exceptionnelle et emblématique, constituée de plusieurs milliers de compositions, interprétées par un orchestre à la longévité unique dans de l'histoire du jazz au XXe siècle. À la fois chef d'orchestre, pianiste et compositeur, Ellington a repris et réarrangé tout au long de sa carrière certaines de ses pièces, créant des versions parfois très différentes de leur premier enregistrement.Ces multiples créations d'une même composition remettent en cause la notion même d'œuvre musicale en jazz, différente de celle qui est admise habituellement dans la musique savante. Si le compositeur recrée son œuvre en permanence, cela veut-il dire qu'elle reste inachevée ? Ou peut-on considérer que chaque version de cette composition est une œuvre ? Notre questionnement nécessite de redéfinir l'œuvre musicale dans notre champ d'étude, le jazz, et en particulier dans le cas de la musique d'Ellington pour comprendre son processus de création.De riches sources d'archives et de nombreuses publications permettent d'étudier cette question de façon transversale. Pourtant, très peu de travaux se sont intéressé à l'évolution des arrangements d'Ellington et nous ne disposons d'aucune étude concernant l'évolution de compositions d'Ellington sur l'ensemble de sa carrière.Pour comprendre les raisons et les modalités de ce processus créatif, un corpus de cinq compositions a été déterminé, dont les versions sont à la fois nombreuses et très différentes les unes des autres : « Mood Indigo », « Solitude », « In a Sentimental Mood », « Sophisticated Lady » et « Black and Tan Fantasy », dont nous disposons d'enregistrements allant de 1927 (date de la création de « Black & Tan Fantasy ») à 1973.Nous nous appuyons sur les versions enregistrées des cinq compositions de ce corpus, ainsi que sur de nombreux documents : partitions manuscrites, témoignages directs d'Ellington et de ses musiciens, publications du vivant d'Ellington, jusqu'à des aux ouvrages musicologiques plus récents, pour comprendre les raisons et les circonstances de la production de ces nouveaux arrangements. Nous avons également produit des analyses musicologiques, enrichies par les entretiens menés avec certains musiciens de l'orchestre.Ce travail a conduit à prendre en considération les versions incorporées dans des medleys, forme typique des performances publiques d'Ellington. Ces dernières constituent la majeure partie de l'activité de l'orchestre et s'avèrent déterminantes dans le processus de création ellingtonien. L'évolution des compositions interprétées, soir après soir, par les mêmes musiciens, se joue, de ce fait, aussi bien sur scène que dans le studio d'enregistrement.Enfin, la vision artistique d'Ellington, son art de la scène et son rapport avec le public, nous amènent à considérer le concert d'Ellington comme une œuvre d'art en soi. L'étude des programmes de concert et l'analyse des setlists contribuent à établir ce nouveau concept de « concert comme œuvre d'art » comme un élément fondamental de la création ellingtonienne
The work of Edward “Duke” Ellington is both unique and emblematic, featuring several thousand compositions, performed by the longest-ever lasting jazz orchestra. Conductor, pianist and composer all at once, Ellington revisited and rearranged some of his pieces throughout his career, in through various arrangements that sometimes differed greatly from the first recording.These multiple versions of the same composition underline the very notion of a musical work in jazz, which differs from that usually accepted in the field of classical music. If the composer is constantly recreating his work, does this mean that it remains unfinished? Or can we consider each version of the composition to be a work of art? Our question requires us to rethink the definition of a musical work in our field of study, jazz, and in particular in the case of Ellington's music, in order to understand his creative process.A large number of archival sources and publications have helped study this question in a cross-disciplinary way. Yet few works have examined the evolution of Ellington's arrangements, and no study has been made of the evolution of Ellington's compositions over his entire career.In order to understand the reasons for and modalities of this creative process, a corpus of five compositions has been identified, whose versions are both numerous and very different from one another: “Mood Indigo”, “Solitude”, “In a Sentimental Mood”, “Sophisticated Lady” and “Black and Tan Fantasy”, for which we have recordings dating from 1927 (date of the creation of “Black & Tan Fantasy”) to 1973.We rely on the recorded versions of the five compositions in this corpus, as well as on numerous documents: manuscript scores, direct testimonies from Ellington and his musicians, publications from Ellington's lifetime, and even more recent musicological works, to understand the reasons and circumstances behind the production of these new arrangements. We also produced musicological analyses, enriched by interviews with some of the orchestra's musicians.This work led us to consider the versions incorporated in medleys, a typical form of Ellington's public performances. These featured the main part of the orchestra's activity, and proved to be a determining factor in Ellington's creative process. The evolution of the compositions performed, night after night, by the same musicians, was as much a matter of course on stage as in the recording studio.Finally, Ellington's artistic vision, his art of the stage and his relationship with the audience, lead us to consider the Ellington concert as a work of art in itself. The study of concert programs and the analysis of setlists help to establish this new concept of “concert as work of art” as a fundamental element of Ellingtonian creation

From the 1970s through the early 1990s numerous critics commented on an apparent “rebirth” of American opera. Subsequent scholarship has increasingly sanctioned a consensus view holding up Philip Glass and John Adams as the central figures in this opera resurgence. Although I do not dispute the importance of (post-)minimalism in these decades, my gambit in this dissertation is to reframe the idea of a late twentieth-century operatic renaissance by tracing a long relationship between jazz and the concept of American opera. The jazz genealogy of American opera that I develop in this study is intended not only to draw attention to a body of work that has been largely ignored but also to unfold antinomies of postmodern historical consciousness that were manifest in the operatic resurgence more generally. Although my inquiry extends as far back as the 1920s, this dissertation by no means presents a continuous history of opera from 1924 to 1994, as the subtitle might imply. The weight is squarely placed on the 1970s through the early 1990s. Chapter 1 explores racial dimensions of the concept of “modernity” through a study of Harlem Renaissance composer H. Lawrence Freeman’s never-performed “jazz opera” American Romance (1924-1929). Chapter 2 chronicles the Harlem Opera Society’s abandonment of its former European repertory and subsequent reinvention as the Afro-American Singing Theater/Jazz Opera Ensemble during the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 3 tracks the transformation of jazz in the 1980s into an increasingly historicist—or possibly posthistoricist—music through a series of works that I call “jazz-historical operas.” Chapter 4 works through a tension between “actuality” and allegory in Robert Ashley’s television opera trilogy (1978-1994) about American history. The name of Duke Ellington winds through the four chapters as a kind of red thread. “Ellington” functions as a multivalent trope, alternatively signifying hypermodern America, the black cultural tradition, composition, and improvisational “actuality.” In a brief epilogue I identify another figure whose name has somewhat more furtively shadowed my study: Richard Wagner. I suggest that the idea of an “Ellington-Wagner matrix” in American opera both symbolizes a tradition of cultural hybridity and identifies a problematic concerning history and sonic materiality (roughly, the distinction between “event” and “representation”) expounded in the preceding chapters. In some ways, my analysis of the deeply ambiguous status of historicity and modernity in twentieth century American culture will prove consonant with many previous discussions of the topic. But I hope that in certain fundamental respects my study may also be understood as a novel, even interventionist foray into historical theory. Race has scarcely been an overlooked topic in critical inquiry and cultural theory of the last three decades, but it is hard to ignore the Eurocentric—or Euro-American—thrust of much of the canonical discourse on postmodernity and historicity, some of which was surveyed above. My attempts to interpret transformations in historical consciousness through shifting relationships between two culturally and racially supercharged signifiers—“jazz” and “opera”—might be taken as a challenge to this tendency.

Abstract The career of composer, bandleader, and pianist Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington spanned many eras of American musical history. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1899, Ellington began performing professionally in the period between 1915 and 1918, just as the word jazz was gaining currency and the first recordings of this boisterous, syncopated music were going out to the public. He came of age in New York City during the 1920s, joining Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, George Gershwin, and other notable figures in producing music that embodied the brash spirit and blues-tinged optimism of the Jazz Age. In the 1930s and 1940s he reached artistic maturity, winning acclaim as both a distinctive composer and a popular exponent of big band swing. In later years Ellington absorbed influences from bebop, soul jazz, bossa nova, gospel, and rock, composed a series of sacred works, and looked outside the United States for inspiration in The Far East Suite (1964-66), The Latin American Suite (1968), and The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (1970). By the time of his death in 1974, Ellington had witnessed the panoramic unfolding of jazz history from the orchestral ragtime of James Reese Europe to the electric fusion of Weather Report.