This essay offers an overview both of Alejo Carpentier’s writings and González Echevarría’s own work as a literary critic, especially as it pertains to his monograph, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977). He traces the arc of Carpentier’s works, beginning with ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and ending with El arpa y la sombra pointing to recurrent, highly original themes such as Afro-Cuban culture, classical music and jazz, colonial history, and exile, all the while noting Carpentier’s dialogue with a younger generation of Latin American writers. González Echevarría comments on the influence exerted by the concept of “the marvelous real” on Boom writers and magical realism. The essay ends by reflecting on Carpentier’s lies about his biography and points to similarities in his last novel, El arpa y la sombra (1978), between the character Christopher Columbus’s penchant to lie and his foreignness, and Carpentier himself.

This chapter follows Tocqueville in arguing that civic culture must support formal learning in schools and colleges, by providing a social spirit of reflective patriotism. A particular challenge given America’s civic fracture of angry polarization, but also widespread apathy, is to motivate citizens to care about America, citizenship education, and a discursive patriotism; thus, civics now should emphasize stories of American hope and achievement, forging an e pluribus unum out of our pluralism. It then develops the sections: (a) E Pluribus Unum and Civic Hope: Jazz, Constitutionalism, Religious Liberty – with subsections on (i) American Story and Song, Especially Jazz – featuring the Ray Charles version of American the Beautiful, Justice O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis in conversation, and jazz pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, (ii) The Declaration and Constitution as Achievements of Harmony, and (iii) Religious Liberty and Pluralism as American Harmony, featuring George Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

This poses the problem of American civic fracture and failing civic attachment, and points to renewed civics as the remedy.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

A comprehensive examination of the plays and prose of Adrienne Kennedy, with particular focus on two works she premiered in 1976: A Rat’ s Mass / Procession in Shout, an operatic adaptation of her early play A Rat’ s Mass, composed and directed by the jazz composer and pianist Cecil Taylor; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, a play derived from Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood film and her memory of her brother’s devastating car accident. The chapter also explores Kennedy’s experiments in visual art, with particular attention to her own and her mother’s scrapbooks, her assemblage of photographed objects ("Cherished Objects from the Past"), her use of quotation, and the mixed-media nature of her manuscripts.

This chapter discusses the search for a modernist musical culture in Czechoslovakia after 1918 and the ideological underpinnings of this search. The chapter also focuses on three specific modernist tendencies: neoclassicism, neofolklorism, and a set of musical trends termed civilism, which runs parallel to the German New Objectivity movement. Although based on different techniques and viewpoints, the three tendencies are marked by internal similarities. All three approaches to modern composition aim at abandoning Romantic sensibilities and avoiding romanticism through different means: neoclassicism by a recourse to pre-Romantic music; neofolklorism in an exploration of musical traditions of the common people from different ethnic groups; and civilism in a reliance on jazz.

This chapter addresses an alternative history of The Rite of Spring: principally, as a meme of modernity within popular culture and cinema. Stravinsky’s score, we learn, has inspired countless jazz practitioners and film directors: who, how, when and why are important questions raised, giving the reader a clear sense of the contemporary currency of Stravinsky’s music with an audience of listeners and musicians for whom the original ballet has taken on new life and meaning.

Bernstein’s extrovert personality, ambitions and eclectic talent were perhaps best demonstrated in the theatrical medium, and this chapter explores the origins of Bernstein’s relationship with this medium, looking at the collaborations, contexts, and influences surrounding his first works for the New York stage: the ballet Fancy Free (1944) and the musicals On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). There is a particular focus on Bernstein’s employment of symphonic dance music, the rhythmic vitality contained within many numbers, and his inclusion of both ‘highbrow’ compositional techniques and ‘lowbrow’ sounds of jazz and popular culture within his scores. The author also considers how Bernstein’s music helped to vividly portray the locations and characters within the shows, and discusses the musical elements found in these early works that would later resurface in his contribution to West Side Story.

This chapter examines the current state of jazz in Australia through the lens of notable practitioners—Andrea Keller, Simon Barker, Gian Slater, Kristin Berardi, Phil Slater and Jamie Oehlers. Presented as a panel discussion, the participants explore the term ‘jazz’ as it is perceived both by audiences and the practitioners themselves, discuss the challenges of presenting original music in a country as isolated as Australia, and question whether there is an audible Australian jazz ‘dialect’.

For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.

Kerouac referred to the Black American as “the essential American” and “the salvation of America,” phrases that, while never adequately explored in Kerouac’s writing, signal at least recognition of the centrality of Black Americans and Black American culture to the broader American society. This chapter explores how consumption of Black culture and Blackness as a catalytic theme weaves throughout Kerouac’s work and is key to his broader aesthetic philosophy. However, this chapter argues that his often superficial readings ignore the reality of Black constraint, subsequently rendering Black life discrepant with the lived experience of Blackness in America. Problematically, his longing is ultimately predicated on Black silence and evasion of Black interiority, and any identification with Blacks is transitory and does not ameliorate his uses of Blackness.

Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.

Between October 1955 and March 1958, Bernstein presented seven television broadcasts on the Omnibus culture series. He addressed topics from Beethoven, Bach, modern music, and opera to musical theatre and jazz and appealed widely to audiences, educating and offering knowledge while avoiding excessively elevated language. Writing the scripts himself, Bernstein effortlessly moved from various roles as a conductor, narrator, pianist, and educator within the context of the show, dazzling audiences with his charismatic personality and stylish attire. The programmes were well received, with an estimated sixteen million viewers tuning in to watch the December 1955 ‘The Art of Conducting’ broadcast. His carefully selected words, analogies, and references were extremely relatable to the middle-class family demographics of the programmes, and the broadcasts fostered Bernstein’s growing pop-star status as he gained international popularity as a conductor and both a Broadway and classical composer.