Conference Agenda

The progression set forth by the civil rights movement inspired Lee Morgan to record “Search for the New Land” in 1964, but it was shelved for two years due to the commercial success of his album, The Sidewinder. In the interim Morgan recorded other albums in The Sidewinder’s hard bop style, but the eventual release of “Search for the New Land” saw Morgan move towards the musical freedoms afforded by the post-bop style, pointing towards a style shift in jazz at large. In recent years, the piece has grown in popularity following its prevalence in the documentary, I Called Him Morgan. This popularity and the common practice of transcribing in the jazz genre would lead one to expect an accurate edition of “Search for the New Land,” but alas there are no known editions that succeed in articulating the calculated decisions of Morgan.

This paper discusses the challenges posed by creating a critical edition involving improvised melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and formal features through the analysis of Lee Morgan’s style and the surrounding repertoire. The result of this detailed study is a platform for more accurate performance and analysis of the piece that directly combats the pervasive errors in previously available editions. The newly offered critical edition provides a case study in combining the musicological craft of deciphering music manuscripts to create new editions based on the knowledge and interpretation of style with the art of transcription that is integral to the jazz genre. While traditional critical editions center around manuscripts, jazz must supplant critical editing with transcriptions stemming from aural material; they are both predicated on the similar skills of notation and style awareness as highlighted in this new approach to “Search for the New Land.”

The 1962 Oak Press release “Folksinger’s Guide to Guitar,” introduces its method by claiming “in the quest of ‘beauty’ you will find very soon that folk music must become a way of life, not merely a study. This book…can only hope to point you in the right direction. The rest of the journey is up to you,” followed by a list of folk luminaries “who have traveled [that road] before,” including Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and Joan Baez. The “Folksinger’s Guide,” a companion to a 1956 pedagogical record by Pete Seeger of the same name, affirms the character of the bourgeoning post-WWII American Folk Revival by framing the movement through the icon of the singer-guitarist who is well versed in the rural styles of the African-American South and Appalachia.

In this paper, I identify strategies of what I term “folk guitaristic legibility,” by which the image and voice of the singer-guitarist became fixed as the standard presentation of American folk revival performance. I argue that the aesthetic shift from pre-war American folk song, oriented around choral singing and Western classical orchestration, to a guitar-centered folk revival was facilitated not only by the popularity of iconic singer-guitarists like Leadbelly and Guthrie, but by a variety of texts that standardized folk guitar pedagogy to expand the reach of the musical tradition. In this paper I evaluate folk LPs, liner notes, guitar pedagogy books, and publicity photos to more thoroughly understand the role that print played in solidifying folk guitaristic legibility.

I draw on perspectives regarding Pete Seeger’s “People’s Songs” movement and the early history of the American folk revival from scholars such as Richard Reuss, Robbie Lieberman, Benjamin Filene, and Jennifer Lynn Stoever. I extend this analysis with examples from my dissertation research on Yiddish-American folk song, arguing that “folk guitaristic legibility” transformed the presentation and reception of Yiddish language folk song in the United States to prioritize the guitar as an accompaniment to vocal performance.

Music notation underwent a peculiar change during the long nineteenth century. Unlike earlier transformations—largely characterized by developments in the techne of music writing—this change was nearly entirely ideological and sociological. By the turn of the twentieth century, to inscribe something in score implied different attitudes and behaviors than it did a century earlier.

In his Vie de Rossini (1824), Stendhal famously commented on these attitudes and behaviors, noting on the one hand changes in Rossini’s notational habits (emphasizing especially that he would write out his fioriture in detail), and on the other changes in listening behaviors among Paris’s so-called dilettantes. While some Rossini scholars (notably Philip Gossett and Richard Osborne) have rejected Stendhal’s accounts as too embellished for responsible biographical scholarship, others (notably Benjamin Walton) see Stendhal as an important point of access for other types of historical inquiries.

Joining with the latter, this paper contends that the proper context for Stendhal’s remarks may be a broadly conceived cultural history of notation. Reviving Gary Tomlinson’s conception of “music writing,” I argue that Stendhal’s commentary places Rossini’s notation in the 1820s alongside trends in the history of writing more generally. The new attitudes and behaviors he sees within Rossini’s music and among its public align with calls for writing that specifies and designates, that is more rationale and scientific in its goals, and that thereby promises greater impact when its instructions are followed precisely. This kind of rhetoric has clear echoes in the early work of Auguste Comte and his philosophy of positivism. More abstractly, it resonates with Jean-François Champollion’s work on deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, as well as with observations made about the French by Egyptian cleric Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi. It stands apart, moreover, from earlier positions like Jean-Jacques Rousseu’s, which famously resisted designation and specification as goals for writing.

Lastly, this paper will suggest that case studies like this one on Stendhal can provide valuable inroads toward understanding the sociological and ideological transformation of notation more generally in the long nineteenth century.