Riffing the Canon

When I was invited to speak about musical canons to the Music Library Association (MLA) and the Society for American Music (SAM) during their joint conference in Pittsburgh in February 2007, my first instinct was to race for the nearest exit. As you will soon see, I have an anticanonical bias that is more the result of my peculiar educational history than any theoretical considerations. So my talk will be anecdotal and experiential. I shall start with a couple of examples of canonic trauma from my earlier years, and then turn to the evolution of my views of what is often considered a jazz canon, the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.¹

Discussions and critiques of the musical canon, its history, and its influence are pretty commonplace these days, but I think that few people younger than I would ever have collided with canonical thinking the way I did back in the fall of 1967. Columbia University had awarded me a fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge to continue my undergraduate studies as an English major. I had been told that one of the nice things about studying at Cambridge was that instead of taking courses, you met with a tutor (the actual term is supervisor), and you could study anything you liked. In reality the system was not as free-form as that; the supervisor had to agree on the direction of your studies, but in principle there was a lot of room for self-direction. I fantasized a year dedicated to the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Virginia Woolf.

But no one had warned me that literary study at Cambridge was under the sway of Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978), the editor of the English journal Scrutiny, or that many of the supervisors were Leavisites, a term I had never heard before. Leavis was a canon maker. Indeed, after Matthew Arnold he was the mother of all canon makers. In his 1948 book, The Great Tradition² (mercilessly parodied in Tom Sharpe's novel, The Great Pursuit),³ Leavis cut the broad and diverse field of the English novel down to a handful of authors and a rigorously, fanatically winnowed list of their books. (If this approach sounds familiar, it may be because The Great Tradition served as a model for Joseph Kerman's Opera as Drama.⁴ )

Leavis had famously remarked that life was not long enough to read Fielding (so much for Tom Jones). And Dickens, it turned out, had only written one book worth reading: Hard Times (an odd choice if you ask me). A few authors—George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad—had actually succeeded in producing more than a single book that met Leavis's exalted standards—though rarely more than three out of their considerable output. I'm not making this up. One evening I saw the great man himself give a lecture—his face had a scowl of chronic irritability that he wore like a distinguished-service medal. It was a big event: the first time Frank Leavis ever lectured about W. B. Yeats. The hall was packed and Leavis did not let us down; over an intense hour and a half he made the case that the allegedly great Irish poet had only written one poem worth reading, or as he kept saying, that you could walk around, that stood up (the poem was "Among School Children").

On another occasion one of Leavis's disciples, a brilliant young don, gave a talk on Fellini's movie 8 1/2. You will be happy to know that he thought it was worth watching, but it is almost impossible for me to describe the earnestness, the pain, the visible writhings of his moral and intellectual conscience (this was the approved Leavisite style of operation) with which he made the case for what was after all just a movie, but one which he painstakingly placed in an intermedia, interdisciplinary summum bonum, summa cum laude canon-to-end-all-canons trinity of ultimate greatness along with Plato's Symposium and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.

By the way, when I proposed a...