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In: Advances in Psychology Research, Volume 62 ISBN
978-1-60876-076-8 Editor: Alexandra M. Columbus, pp. 163-184 2010
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Chapter 6
PERCEPTION OF EMOTION IN JAZZ IMPROVISATION
Mark C. Gridley Psychology Department, Cleveland State
University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
ABSTRACT
Knowing that the jazz improviser creates his own material while
performing, some jazz listeners assume that the improvisations can
reveal the musicians emotions. To evaluate this assumption, fifteen
studies were conducted. These studies focused on the possible
perception of anger upon hearing the improvisations of tenor
saxophonist John Coltrane. The instigation for the studies was
that, during the early part of Coltrane's recording career, one
journalist had written that Coltrane was an "angry young tenor,"
and another journalist had referred to "the rage in his playing,"
both of which were the opposite of the performer's stated
intentions. Diversity of responses in the data was substantial, and
it was found that the widely cited anger perceptions of those two
journalists fall within a very small minority view. Nine out of 10
jazz journalists who were contemporaries of those two journalists
did not perceive anger, and anger was perceived by only one of 23
jazz musicians. Anger was perceived by only 18% of 355 non-musician
listeners. When 492 listeners completed questionnaires assessing
their temperaments and heard a recording of the same performance
that had elicited the journalist's "angry young tenor" remark, it
was found that those who scored above the mean in their own trait
anger were twice as likely to perceive anger in the music as those
who scored below the mean. This suggests that jazz improvisation
may serve as the stimulus for a projective test, as an inkblot has
traditionally been employed. The implications of published
perceptions of emotion were demonstrated by two additional studies
with a total of 143 listeners. They showed that perception of anger
in the music was significantly more likely for listeners who were
exposed to the journalist's perception of anger before hearing the
music.
It was concluded that the critical question is not whether
wordless jazz improvisation evokes emotionsit certainly does. The
questions to ask are whether it conveys emotion and whether it does
that reliably. The answers are that the particular emotion evoked
in the listener is not necessarily the same emotion felt by the
jazz improviser, and the emotion evoked is not the same for every
listener. These findings refute the belief of listeners who remain
convinced that they can detect a given players feelings in his
music, and they suggest a biasing effect of journalists' remarks
which might do a disservice to the creative product of the jazz
musician. The studies demonstrate how listener responses are
refracted
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Mark C. Gridley 164
through their personal inclinations, perceptions and emotions,
thereby indicating primarily how they themselves are feeling, not
how the player is feeling.
INTRODUCTION Music is considered to be a medium across nearly
all cultures for expressing both ideas
and emotions. However, for music that has no lyrics or explicit
cultural ritual such as jazz or classical music, the emotions being
expressed may be ambiguous. In some cases it may even be perceived
in contradictory ways. One example is the music of jazz tenor
saxophonist John Coltrane. In a magazine review of a 1958
performance by Coltrane, that he had attended, journalist Don Gold
termed the saxophonist's solo improvisations as produced by an
angry young tenor.1 When reached by phone in 2006, Gold said that
he stood by his 1958 appraisal. In summarizing Coltranes style for
his 1965 book about jazz of the 1950s, Joe Goldberg referred to the
rage in his playing.2 When reached by phone in 2006, Goldberg said
he still perceived anger in Coltrane's playing, as he had in the
pre-1963 playing of Coltrane that led to his "rage in his playing"
remark. He also mentioned that he had met the man several times
and
1 Coltranes playing at the concert, reviewed by Don Gold
[Newport Jazz 1958. down beat, 7 (August), 16], was
recorded and was first available on the LP album Miles and Monk
at Newport (Columbia PC 8978), and subsequently issued on the
compact disc Miles Davis at Newport 1958 (Columbia Legacy CK
85202). Gold wrote, "Although Miles continues to play with delicacy
and infinite grace, his group's solidarity is hampered by the angry
young tenor of Coltrane." At least four aspects should be taken
into consideration when puzzling motives and associations
underlying Don Golds characterization of Coltranes motivation in
his review of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Each of them helps
rule out alternative explanations for his angry young tenor remark
and encourages accepting that Gold genuinely perceived anger in
Coltranes playing. (a) Gold was writing before the time that civil
rights and Black Nationalism were receiving their widest media
attention and motivating some musicians to link angry politics with
their jazz. (b) In his review of the Miles Davis Sextet
performance, Gold also expressed displeasure with Cannonball
Adderleys playing style and linked it to what he disliked about
Coltranes, yet he did not term Adderley as angry or ascribe any
other emotion in that semantic space to Adderley. In other words,
though he identified similar stylistic aspects in both saxophonists
and disliked those aspects ("less concern for melodic structure"),
he did not attribute such sounds from Adderley to anger in
Adderley. This suggests that Gold distinguished style from emotion.
(c) Gold did not question the technical competence of either
saxophonist. So this review does not represent a dismissal of
Coltranes work on technical grounds, combining an emotion
perception with a faulting of Coltranes competence, as some other
journalists later did. (d) That Gold misperceived vigor for anger
is unlikely because in Golds record reviews of the time he
occasionally mentioned vigor, but he never attributed any other
musicians work to anger. This suggests that he could distinguish
vigor from anger and was not prone to perceive anger in the
musicians whom he reviewed, even though he was usually quite
critical, not withholding negative remarks. (e) When reached for
comment in 2006, Gold stood by his 1958 characterization and added
further that he had considered Coltrane in the 1950s to be a
difficult child in the jazz world. Note: Coltrane biographer C. O.
Simpkins (1975; p. 81) termed Gold's writing "a very dumb-assed
review." In response to Gold's review, biographer Lewis Porter
(1998; p. 139) wrote, "I believe that he didn't consciously feel
angryCertainly his music is, at the least, intense, urgent, and
fiercely passionateIt may be angry at some level, and it may be the
intense shouting of a man in pain, of a man who had something
important to say, something he desperately needed to say."
2 Joe Goldberg [(1965), Jazz masters of the fifties. (New York:
Macmillan), 209]. The most recent example of Coltranes playing that
Goldberg heard before he finished the Coltrane passage in book (J.
Goldberg, personal communication, July, 2006) was the 1962 Coltrane
album (Impulse AS-21, reissued as 314 589 567-2, which is commonly
known as the blue album because of its cover color and absence of
an informative title). This means that the music leading Goldberg
to perceive the rage in his playing occurred long before anyone
heard Coltranes turbulent, high-density, collective improvisations
that are documented by such albums as Ascension (Impulse! 543 514;
1965), Meditations (Impulse! 199; 1965), and Live in Seattle
(Impulse! GRD2-146; 1965). Goldberg based his remark on Coltranes
pre-1963 music. This body of work was made before Coltrane came
under the influence of Albert Ayler, another saxophonist whose
music had been perceived as angry by some journalists. (This
perception had occurred despite Aylers inspiration deriving from
the sounds of charismatic Christian church worshippers speaking in
tongues.)
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
165
never considered Coltrane to have an angry personality, but
still detected anger in his saxophone improvisations. He also
volunteered that he disagreed with journalists who thought
Coltrane's playing expressed civil rights militancy.3 The
perceptions of Gold and Goldberg occurred despite the facts that,
when asked about being termed an angry young tenor, Coltrane said,
If it is interpreted as anger, it is taken wrong (Gitler, 1958)
and, when another interviewer asked, Are you angry? Coltrane
responded, No. Im not (Lindgren, 1960). It is also notable that
elsewhere Coltrane stated creative goals that differed considerably
from conveying anger: I know that I want to produce beautiful
music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that
will uplift, and make them happy (Wilmer, 1962) what music is to
meit's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe
we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just
how magnificent and encompassing it is (DeMichael, 1962).
Though it is not possible to verify the feelings of any musician
during performance, the discrepancy between the perception of these
journalists and the creators testimony is striking. Apparently,
these sophisticated listeners were detecting the opposite emotion
of what was intended. These discrepancies motivated the present
series of fifteen studies. One thesis underlying the following
investigations is that it is presumptuous to infer from a
musician's performance that he is in a given emotional state. I
concede, however, that it is possible that a musician may attempt
to convey his emotional state to the listener.
3 During the 1960s, journalists Frank Kofsky and LeRoi Jones
attributed the sound of Coltrane's and Albert Ayler's
avant-garde saxophone improvisations to civil rights militancy.
However, the musicians pointedly disavowed this attribution. They
did not appreciate having their art equated with sociopolitical
issues. [For extensive discussion of the interpretations of Kofsky
and Jones, see Gridley, Mark C. (2007). Misconceptions in linking
free jazz with the civil rights movement. College Music Symposium,
47, 140-155.] Frank Kofsky wrote the world is being engulfed in
revolution. Artists, especially when the art is closely tied the
existence of a people as is jazz, cannot be expected to remain
aloof from the concerns of society at largeToday the revolution in
jazz goes by the name of the avant-garde. No more thrilling
expression of its goals, to my mind, has this latter revolution
produced than that which can be found in the performances of John
Coltrane (liner notes to the 1965 Coltrane album The John Coltrane
Quartet Plays; Impulse! AS-85). Note that Coltrane had resisted
Kofskys attempts to characterize his music as a militant expression
[Kofsky, Frank, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 221-243].
Leroi Jones (Amira Baraka) equated Coltrane with militant leader
Malcolm X [He was Malcolm X in New Super
Bop Fire. Jones, LeRoi, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader.
(New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1971), 271]. See also Jones,
LeRoi, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York:
Freundlich, 1984), 194-195, and Jones, LeRoi, Jazz criticism and
its effect on the art form. New perspectives in jazz. David Baker
(Ed.) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1986), 66. Note, however, that
John Coltranes record producer Bob Thiele said, for the literary
fraternity, the music of Coltrane and othersreally represented
black militancy. Most of the musicians, including Coltrane, really
werent thinking the way their militant brothers were. I mean LeRoi
Jones could feel the music was militant, but Coltrane didnt feel
that it was. But he didnt go out of his way to tell Leroi Jones
that [In the groove: The people behind the music, Ted Fox (Ed.)
(1986). New York: St. Martins Press, 196].
Like Don Gold in the 1950s, Kofsky and Jones remained the
exceptions in the 1960s. In fact, the same music in
which they perceived civil rights militancy was found to give
spiritual uplift to others (Nisenson, 1993; Kahn, 2002). Kofsky's
and Jones' remarks received considerable media attention, however,
and it is therefore understandable that readers of jazz journalism
could have concluded erroneously that this represented the majority
view. Complicating this situation is the fact that Coltrane was
exceedingly prolific. He had five different style periods. This can
become confusing because the focus of the present research is on
perception of Coltrane's late-1950s work that was reviewed by Gold
and Goldberg, not his mid-1960s work that was reviewed by Kofsky
and Jones. The responses of Kofsky and Jones regarding the 1960s
are mentioned here only because their responses are frequently
confused with those of Gold and Goldberg regarding the
late-1950s.
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Mark C. Gridley 166
Several different approaches were used to assess the perceived
emotion in this music. The first two were informal. The remaining
were formal, questionnaire sampling methods. What follows first
summarizes the results of emotion perception surveys from a broad
set of samples, including eleven other groups of listeners. Second,
discussions are provided for four other studies that were conducted
to begin trying to understand what lies behind this discrepancy.
Third, connections are presented with other literature and
speculations on the limitations of knowing what a jazz improviser
is feeling.
ELEVEN STUDIES Brief, informal phone contacts were employed in
the first study reported below because
reaching jazz journalists is a precarious pursuit at best,
reaching retired journalists is even more challenging, and
communication is fleeting, once they are located. In-person contact
at performance sites was employed for collecting emotion
perceptions from active professional jazz musicians in the second
study reported below. The use of questionnaires was ruled out by
the extremely limited and very informal personal access that is
customary to communication with touring jazz musicians. By
contrast, the controlled conditions of college classrooms made
available systematic exposure of student listeners to Coltranes
music and the completion of standardized questionnaires for the
fourth through the eleventh studies. Therefore, because of
differences in data gathering methods, the results from the data
gathering methods might seem to be non-comparable (comparing apples
to oranges, so to speak). Note, however, the methods did not
involve leading questions or otherwise biased interviewing, and
they fulfilled the goal of surveying emotion perception trends for
the saxophone playing of John Coltrane. The different methods
represented three expedient manners that were tailored for
gathering emotion perceptions from three very different samples.
All the methods focused on collecting impressions of presence or
absence of anger without initially asking about anger. That
particular emotion was mentioned only after the respondent had
already independently addressed his personal perception of emotion
in Coltranes music, and only if the respondent did not volunteer
any opinion on presence or absence of anger in Coltrane's
improvisations.
Perceptions of Musicians. Twenty-three different professional
jazz musicians, aged 22 to 63 years, with a mean age of 43 years,
all men, were contacted at their performance sites during their
visits to the Cleveland, Ohio area for concerts during 2004 and
2005. All were familiar with Coltrane's music. When the author
personally asked, Tell me the single best adjective to describe
Coltranes playing, none used angry or any synonyms for angry or
other adjectives in its semantic space. When subsequently asked,
"Do you think Coltranes music was angry? only one said, Yes.
Perceptions of Critics. The author identified and contacted ten
jazz critics who had been active in jazz journalism before Don
Golds angry young tenor remark first appeared in print in 1958.
This was not a random sample. The interviewees were the first ten
jazz journalists from that period whom the author was able to find
by way of contacts in the publishing community during 2006. All had
written for leading jazz magazines in the 1950s. Their ages ranged
from 76 to 80 years. All were contacted by phone. When he first
reached them, the author told them he was preparing an article on
John Coltrane. When asked When did you first hear Coltrane? all
reported the period of the 1950s. In response to the question
"What
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
167
emotion, if any, did you perceive in Coltrane's playing the
first time you heard it," none said "anger." When subsequently
asked "Did you feel that Coltranes music was angry?" all but one
said, No.
To counter liabilities of memory, the author surveyed all the
record reviews and concert reviews of Coltrane's performances from
the 1950s and 60s that were cited in Music Index. The survey
revealed no other comments about perceiving anger in Coltrane's
music. Though some readers may perceive methodological weakness in
using 2006 retrospective reports from the jazz journalists who were
active before being exposed to Don Gold's 1958 "angry young tenor"
remark, the fact remains that none of these journalists wrote about
perceiving anger in Coltrane's improvised solos within their
articles for down beat magazine or elsewhere at that time. This
suggests that their retrospective reports are reliable.
Perceptions of Jazz-Nave Students. A Perception of Emotion
Survey (Appendix A) was prepared, one line of which constituted a
7-point continuum in which position 1 was friendly and position 7
was angry. (Though friendly is not commonly listed as an emotion or
considered an antonym for angry, for this study it constituted
something antithetical to angry, as a hostile attitude opposes a
friendly attitude.) Other lines on the form contained continua for
"tense-relaxed," "happy-sad," and "lively-not lively." The form
asked respondents to "Circle the number that best indicates your
perception of emotion in the saxophone solo you heard on the
recording: friendly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 angry."
A convenience sample was employed for data gathering. The survey
was conducted on 355 students enrolled in an assortment of
different classes at four different colleges. Participants were not
selected at random. They were chosen only because their instructors
made them available to the author after he told them that he sought
listeners for a study on music perception. The instructors did not
know the studys hypothesis, were not familiar with the recordings,
and, upon debriefing, revealed that they did not recognize the
source of the music. The nature of the assortment of listeners
reflects only the author's wish to obtain a wide range of listeners
within populations that were available to him. It is not warranted
to become concerned with differences in responses between the
samples and speculate about links between such differences and
characteristics of the college classes.
The first set of studies consisted of the following nine parts.
To appraise a general trend in the effect of Coltrane's saxophone
improvisations, the first three studies used recordings that
provided the Coltrane examples on compilations accompanying jazz
history textbooks that were widely used in colleges and
universities. It was assumed that the examples had been selected
for these compilations by the textbook authors because this
particular music was representative of Coltrane's work. The
remaining studies used a recording of the concert performance by
Coltrane that had evoked Don Gold's "angry young tenor" remark when
Gold attended and reviewed that concert.
The Acknowledgement selection from Coltranes A Love Supreme
album (Coltrane, 1964) was played for 76 college students who were
enrolled in an interdisciplinary, junior level, humanities course
at college #1. They were given no introduction to the task other
than to say that they were part of a survey on emotion perception.
Participants were not told whom they were hearing, nor did their
teacher know the identity of the performer. Questionnaires
indicated that their previous exposure to jazz was little to none.
Of the 76 students, 52 indicated perceptions on the friendly side
by circling 1, 2 or 3, whereas 17 endorsed the midpoint by circling
"4", and 8 students rated the music on the angry side of the
continuum by circling 5, 6 or 7.
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Mark C. Gridley 168
Your Lady from Coltranes Live at Birdland album (Coltrane, 1963)
was played for 53 students in another junior level,
interdisciplinary humanities class at college #1, using the same
method as the previous survey. Questionnaire responses indicated
that these students were equally nave regarding jazz. Of these 53
students, 39 rated the saxophone playing on the friendly side by
circling 1, 2 or 3, whereas 8 rated the music at the midpoint by
circling "4", and 5 students rated the music on the angry side by
circling 5, 6 or 7.
Harmonique from the Coltrane Jazz album (Coltrane, 1959) was
played for the 16 freshmen students in their Introduction to the
Liberal Arts class at college #1, using the same method as the
previous surveys. Questionnaire responses indicated that these
students were equally nave regarding jazz. Of the 16 students, 9
endorsed positions on the friendly side, 2 at the midpoint, and 5
on the angry side.
The remaining six studies used a 2' 42" recording of the
Coltrane solo on Two Bass Hit" from his 1958 Newport Jazz Festival
performance with bandleader Miles Davis (Davis, 1958) that had
elicited Don Gold's angry young tenor remark. Perception of Emotion
Survey forms were collected from 210 students in Music
Appreciation, Introduction to Psychology, and Introduction to
Sociology classes at three different colleges who heard the music
in their regular class periods in their regular classrooms.
Questionnaire responses indicated that these students were equally
nave regarding jazz.
Of the 355 student listeners in the remaining six studies, 61
percent perceived the music as "friendly" (endorsing positions 1,
2, or 3), 21 percent rated the music as neither "friendly" nor
"angry" (endorsing position 4, which is the midpoint of the 7-point
scale), and 18 percent perceived it as "angry" (endorsing positions
5, 6 or 7).
Caveats Regarding Methodology At first glance, the data
gathering methods in the different studies may seem not
sufficiently similar to justify making comparisons between their
respective results. At least seven different caveats can be
considered. For example, (1) data from questions of musicians and
critics about perceptions of Coltrane's music in general might not
be entirely comparable to data from questionnaires administered to
students in response to hearing Coltrane selections in particular.
Similarly, (2) familiarity with Coltrane's playing differed among
respondents. Recall, however, that all the selections played for
the students typify Coltrane's improvisations, and the journalist
interviewees and musician interviewees were all familiar with
Coltrane's work, via numerous recordings. Therefore, such caveats
do not entirely invalidate generalizing from the results of the
different studies.
Another issue is that (3) different style periods of Coltranes
career provided the stimuli for different surveys. Yet whatever
effects these differences may have had, it is important to
acknowledge that the overriding goal for the series of studies was
to explore perception of anger in response to Coltrane's
improvisations. Therefore, because all the improvisations were
typical of Coltrane, using an assortment of musical samples is not
inconsistent with pursuing that goal. In fact, by using an
assortment we may have obtained results that are more
representative than results obtained by using only one sample of
music.
Another issue is (4) that the questions asked of interviewees
differed between the musicians and the critics, and they differed
further from the Perception of Emotion Survey forms completed by
the student listeners. All these sources of data ultimately focused
on the
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
169
same emotion in the same musician's improvisations, however, and
the observed trends remain useful to examine.
Another issue is (5) the possible influence of interviewer bias
on the answers supplied by musicians and critics. Though such bias
might have existed, it is unlikely because the interviewer came to
the task with six years experience in conducting psychological
evaluations that minimized bias.
Another methodological question that might arise is (6) whether
polling student listeners in 2006 for their perceptions of music
made in 1958 provides perspective on perception of emotion by
listeners in 1958, such as Don Gold. The answer is that we will
never know for certain whether Don Gold typified listeners in 1958
because we did not poll hundreds of other listeners in 1958, but
the survey of Coltrane record and concert reviews published during
that era, which were cited in Music Index, and a number of
interviews with journalists and musicians from that era failed to
show perception of anger.
The polling of student listeners in 2006 for music made in 1958
may be an issue for an additional reason. (7) Increased amounts of
hard, rough sounding music that have occurred since 1958 might have
made recent listeners less likely to perceive anger in the same
music that would have caused listeners to perceive anger in 1958.
In other words, if hard, rough sounds have become much more common
in recent music, are recent listeners then going to endorse
"friendly" more often than "angry" for the Coltrane performance of
1958? If the answer is "Yes, they are," then we should expect
recent listeners to be less likely to describe the same music as
angry. Having grown up with smoother, softer sounding music, older
listeners might be more inclined to perceive Coltranes hard, rough
music as angry than younger listeners. As plausible as this
reasoning is, the fact remains that most of the older listeners who
were interviewed were not inclined to perceive anger in Coltrane's
playing. Therefore, it may be best to transcend age-specific and
era-specific aspects of this study's data gathering methods because
such aspects seem to play only minor roles.
To summarize the implications of the caveats it is reasonable to
say that, despite differences in the ways they were collected,
these data provided clear trends that remain useful to
contemplate.
DISCUSSION Considerable diversity was evident in the responses
of the student listeners. One trend was
consistent with those among the surveys of journalists from the
1950s, however. Endorsements on the angry side of the
friendly-angry continuum were the minority perceptions, just as
Gold's angry young tenor and Goldbergs the rage in his playing
perceptions had represented minority perceptions among jazz
journalists.
The professional jazz musicians, the other jazz journalists who
were contemporaneous to Gold and Goldberg, and 82% of the student
listeners diverged from the anger perceptions of the two
journalists, which, in turn, diverged from the testimony of
Coltrane himself. The implications of this divergence in perception
of emotion in Coltranes improvisations are important for several
reasons. Coltrane was an enormously influential innovator of
musical concepts that were revealed by his improvisations,
compositions, and band leading. He was one of the most significant
creative forces in the twentieth century. More than one hundred
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Mark C. Gridley 170
albums have been issued under his name (Fujioka, 1995), and
numerous books have been devoted to his life (Thomas, 1975;
Simpkins, 1975; Cole, 1976; Priestley, 1987; Nisenson, 1993; Fraim,
1996; Porter, 2000; Ratliff, 2007). Jazz musicians study his
improvisations in the way that classical musicians study the
compositions of J. S. Bach. To risk presuming what lay behind
Coltranes contributions could affect listeners and his legacy. For
instance, even as recently as 2001, a media report (Blumenthal,
2001) was perpetuating the anger perception from Gold's 1958
account, as though it represented more than just that one
journalists perception. An atypical perception may be construed as
typical because of the reputation of the journal publishing it. For
example, down beat, the magazine that contained the angry young
tenor remark and Gitlers follow-up (1958), had a circulation in
excess of 100,000 readers at the time the review appeared.
THREE MORE STUDIES Biasing New Listeners. The perception of
listeners who had not yet formed their own
impressions of the music or its creator could be biased by
publishing written impressions of anger as though the emotion were
a fact and as though it revealed personal demons of the artist.
Certainly there are readers who recognize that such remarks reflect
no more than the personal impressions of the reviews author, just
as there are readers who have already formed their own opinions and
are unlikely to be swayed by a divergent review. A reviews
potential for biasing the perception of novice listeners, however,
is the hazard that had motivated the surveys. This hazard was
evident in a twelfth study (Gridley & Hoff, 2010) using the
same Perception of Emotion Survey response sheet (Appendix A) that
was used for the previous nine studies. It found that, by
comparison with perceptions of unbiased listeners, the average
perception of anger in Coltrane's solo by listeners who read Don
Gold's "angry young tenor" remark before hearing the music was
significantly higher (t = 2.15; df = 52; p = .036; two-tailed; d =
.587). The study was conducted by taking one half of a group of
listeners and preceding their music with the written statement "You
are going to hear a recording of a concert at which a journalist
reviewed the music by writing that the tenor saxophone soloist was
an 'angry young tenor.'" The other half of the same group of
listeners read, "You are going to hear a recording of a concert at
which a tenor saxophonist was the soloist." The study was
replicated on another group of listeners (Gridley & Hoff,
2010), and it obtained essentially the same results (t = 2.924; df
= 86; p = .004; two-tailed; d = .624). The results suggest that
journalists' remarks can have a biasing effect by priming the
perceptions of the listener. The concern here is that the bias may
do a disservice to the creative product of the jazz musician.
Listeners Projecting Their Own Anger. Why did two journalists
and 18 percent of the surveyed student listeners perceive anger?
From the data cited above, it is apparent that extent of listening
experience and musical expertise are not sufficient to explain the
divergence in perception of emotion, as journalists who were
equally familiar with Coltrane's playing diverged dramatically in
appraisal of its emotion. Some answers may lie within individual
differences in listeners' personalities. A start toward
investigating this avenue was found in the thirteenth and
fourteenth studies. In the thirteenth study (Gridley & Hoff,
2007), using the same response form from the previous studies
(Appendix A), 205 listeners indicated their perceptions of emotion
in a recording of the same 1958 Newport Jazz Festival performance
by
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
171
John Coltrane that had evoked Don Gold's angry young tenor
remark. They also completed the Multidimensional Anger Inventory
(Siegel, 1985). It was found that listeners who perceived anger in
the music were about twice as likely to be high in their own
personality trait anger as listeners who did not perceive anger in
the music. A fourteenth study (Gridley, 2009) was conducted on 287
listeners. It used the same response form (Appendix A) and same
music, but listeners also completed the State-Trait Anger Scale
(Spielberger, 1983). The average personality trait anger score for
the listeners in that study who rated the music as angry was
significantly higher than the average personality trait anger score
for those who rated it as friendly. Also, a small but significant
correlation was found between perceptions of anger in the music and
trait anger in the listeners.
In other words, just because the majority of students in 2006
perceived as "friendly" the same solo that Don Gold perceived as
"angry" in 1958 we cannot conclude that the perceptions of the
current sample reflect only that perceptions of emotion in the
music have changed over the past fifty years. The survey of
Coltrane record and concert reviews from the 1950s, interviews with
older musicians, and the set of interviews with Gold's age peers
indicated that in 1958 Gold's perception was atypical. It was
atypical then, and the above surveys demonstrate that it remains
atypical now, even among non-fans. More importantly, none of this
reasoning refutes the above-cited findings that demonstrate
personality trait anger to be significantly related to listeners'
tendencies to perceive anger in Coltrane's music.
BROADER IMPLICATIONS These findings are important because
journalists may impute particular emotions to jazz
improvisation. In doing so they might mislead their readers and
misrepresent the improviser. Therefore, the broader question that
is raised by these data would be Is jazz improvisation reliable for
communicating emotion? The remainder of this chapter calls upon a
number of different approaches to address this question.
Is Jazz Improvisation Reliable for Communicating Emotion?
A jazz improviser creates his own material while performing it.
Knowing this, listeners
might assume that the improviser reveals his emotions by the
music. The confidence of such listeners is questionable, however,
because of (a) the diversity of causes fueling each improvisation
and (b) the lack of congruence between the frames of reference held
by listener and jazz improviser. Rosenhan (1973) wrote When the
origins of and stimuli that give rise to a behavior are remote or
unknown, or when the behavior strikes us as immutable, trait labels
about the behaver arise. He went on to say, Whenever the ratio of
what is known to what needs to be known approaches zero, we tend to
invent knowledge and assume that we understand more than we
actually do.
Perhaps we can appreciate some of the problems when we consider
a position espoused by the eminent Gestalt psychologist and expert
on art perception, Rudolf Arnheim. It was his contention that
wordless music can express emotion because it contains the same
dynamic properties embodied by visual forms and human emotions.
Arnheim believed that "expression resides in the perceptual
qualities of the stimulus pattern (1974, p. 449) because it has
the
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Mark C. Gridley 172
same form in different media and the forces within it are easily
transposed. He reminded us, however, that "...perceptual expression
does not necessarily relate to a mind 'behind it'" (p. 451). He
contended that the properties of a stimulus pattern are naturally
expressive "...there is no need to assume that the relation between
sound and meaning needs to be learned like a foreign language...the
tones of the scale have perceptual properties whose dynamic
characteristics are asserted here to convey expression and meaning
spontaneously (1984, p. 303).
Lack of Congruent Frames of Reference. Arnheim's position is
questionable with respect to modern jazz. To appreciate what can be
manipulated in wordless music, remember that, as Aristotle (347
B.C.) had observed, the only qualities of experience that can be
reliably received by all the senses are motion or rest, magnitude,
roughness or smoothness, number, and intensity. This is the extent
of specificity that physical energy possesses when it impinges on
sense receptors. All other information must be interpreted from
those aspects. Music without lyrics is not like verbal
communication. After it leaves its creator and strikes your ear,
music is abstract. No matter what meaning its creator intended, if
he intended any at all, the music is no more than sound (Gridley,
1978, p. 338). If the sound communicates, the listener and the
improvising musician must both agree upon properties of human
emotion that correspond to proportions of each quality. (Such a
situation is consistent with Arnheim's position.)
From this, let us first hypothesize a simplistic example. Employ
the variable of motion or rest in the form of rate of beats
passing. If both musician and listener agree that a certain tempo
range, perhaps 160 to 220 beats per minute, corresponds to
agitation, the improvising jazz musician need merely perform at
such a rapid tempo every time he is feeling agitated, and the
listener will accurately receive the message of agitation. However,
if the musician employs such quick tempos whenever he feels high
spirited and vigorous, not agitated, then the communication has
failed because the listener is made to feel agitated rather than
merely high-spirited. Gridley (1986) has mentioned this, and Juslin
(2003, p. 802) also acknowledged it: fast speed can be used in both
happiness and anger.
We could make a similar argument for intensity. For instance, if
an improvising jazz musician plays loudly when he feels friendly
and happy, yet the listener perceives aggression when he hears loud
music, the musician has not accurately conveyed his own feeling to
that listener. The creator and the receiver do not have congruent
frames of reference, even though a cross-modal quality of stimulus
is being reliably conveyed.
Incidentally, with respect to communication by literature,
Edward Hirsch (1967) has contended that "...the author's intended
meaning cannot be known...Not even the author can reproduce his
original meaning because nothing can bring back his original
meaning experience" (p. 16). Particularly apt to interpretation of
jazz, Hirsch also has remarked for poetry interpretation that
"...too many interpreters in the past have sought autobiographical
meanings where none were meant" (p. 16). "I can never know another
person's intended meaning with certainty because I cannot get
inside his head to compare the meaning he intends with the meaning
I understand, and only by direct comparison could I be certain that
his meaning and my own are identical" (p. 17).
Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946) have discussed a complicating
factor that is overlooked by art receivers who believe that in the
art there is always a referent to the artist's own personal meaning
and that it is accurately conveyed. Hirsch (1967) summarized what
they call the intentional fallacy: "The author's desire to
communicate a particular meaning is not necessarily the same as his
success in doing so. Since his actual performance is presented
in
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
173
his text, any special attempt to divine his intention would
falsely equate his private wish with his public accomplishment" (p.
11). This implies that if a jazz improviser really did want to
convey a particular emotion, and then tried, he might not be
perceived as having the emotion (or the intention) if he failed to
conjure it in sound. Hirsch offered an example for which we might
imagine musical parallels. "A poet intends in a four-line poem to
convey desolation, but what he manages to convey to some readers is
a sense that the sea is wet, to others that twilight is
approaching" (p. 12).
I am not the only thinker who has realized the limitations of
communication by music without words. For example, Leonard Meyer
(1967, p. 43) has observed "...if communication is to take place,
the symbols used must have the same significance (the same
implications) for both the sender (composer) and the receiver
(listener)--that is, they must evoke similar expectations." Data
obtained by David Such (1993) support this in jazz. He exposed 400
non-musician college students to a live performance of jazz
improvisations. The performance was videotaped. The performing
musicians later watched the tape and identified the moments of peak
excitement and interaction. Ratings by the students demonstrated
that they were mostly unable to recognize moments in the
performance that the musicians reported as climactic.
As anyone knows who has compared different reviews of the same
album or the same concert, diversity of response is the norm.
Similarly, having asked 397 different people to supply written
descriptions of their perceptions to an assortment of jazz
recordings, with minimal information about the music or musicians
being provided, I found that it was impossible to guess that all
the authors were describing the same music. The variation in
responses among listeners in the first eleven studies described in
this chapter also documents the extent of individual differences at
detecting emotion in jazz. In other words, jazz improvisation not a
reliable means for communication.
Jazz improvisation is not the only kind of music that refutes
those who would impute a universal language. The world is full of
music that can only be comprehended in the context of the culture.
The sound of the flute, for example, is considered feminine in some
cultures while a male fertility symbol in others. The sound of the
Australian dijeridoo, though meaningful to its indigenous players
and hearers, is perceived as anonymous buzzing by Western
listeners. And vocal sounds, often considered precursors to music,
are also subject to diverse interpretations. Many people have run
to the aid of a screaming child, only to find that he/she was
merely exercising his/her voice exuberantly and not in distress at
all. If vocal sounds are subject to this much misattribution, why
should we expect musical-instrument sounds to be more reliable?
MISATTRIBUTION OF EMOTION BY LISTENERS Because many of the
causes for jazz improvisation are unknown to the ordinary
listener,
the "meaning" of a jazz sound might be only the listener
"hearing" his own feelings. Could this have been what was occurring
with the journalist who termed Coltrane an angry young tenor or the
journalist who referred to the rage in his playing? This may
exemplify a phenomenon in the social psychology of communication
called misattribution, in which a stimulus is attributed to the
wrong source or a behavior to the wrong motive (Heider, 1958;
Kelly, 1967).
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Mark C. Gridley 174
This issue was also enunciated by Rudolf Arnheim (1974, p. 449)
in asking, "Are the feelings expressed in sights and sounds those
of the artist who created them or those of the recipient?"
As a complicating factor in listener interpretation of
expression in jazz performance we also need to acknowledge the
African origins for diverse bending of the strings on musical
instruments and in their subsequent emergence in blues guitar
styles. This is termed worrying the pitch, as is so common in much
African-American music, including jazz styles for playing wind
instruments. It is not necessarily an indication of emotion so much
as a stylized exercising of varied sounds for the sake of
ornamentation. This is roughly analogous to the use of grace notes,
trills, and turns in European classical music. There is also a
tradition of hokum (playing odd sounds just for the sake of fun)
that fed into the origins of jazz and remains common practice that
is parallel and/or complementary to the African tradition of pitch
bending. This, too, can be mistaken for expression of a jazz
improviser's emotions.
Examples
Was John Coltrane Conveying Anger?
Variation among listeners is often dramatic in response to the
same improvisation. If we can rule out misattribution, do the
hearers' differences indicate that they are misreading the message
or merely focusing on different attributes in the stimulus?
Disagreement between intentions of jazz musicians and corresponding
reactions of listeners was illustrated in the following radio
interview with saxophonist John Coltrane (Lindgren, 1960).
Interviewer: It is an honor to have John Coltrane in front of
our microphone here. And
John, I gotta be abrupt with you. I've gotta say it like this:
That your playing has been termed "un-tenderlike, unbeautiful,"
un--just about everything you can think of. And since the playing
mirrors the personality, I guess you have some personal thoughts of
that kind to say.
Coltrane: Oh, well, they seem to think that it's an angry sort
of thing, as a rule. Some of them do. I don't know.
Interviewer: So you feel angry? Coltrane: No, I don't.
Interviewer: In the album liners of your latest LP, that was the
Giant Steps LP, which we
have played quite a lot on this show--you claim that you were
trying to get, as I understood it, a more beautiful sound.
Coltrane: I hope to play not necessarily a more beautiful sound,
though I would like to, just say tone-wise, I would like to be able
to produce a more beautiful sound. But now I'm primarily interested
in trying to work what I have, what I know, down into a more
lyrical line, you know. That's what I mean by beautifulmore
lyrical, so itll be, you know, easily understood. The above may be
a case of misattribution. The music that John Coltrane offered
was
intended to attain a greater lyricism. Yet some listeners
attributed it to anger in Coltrane, anger that Coltrane said he did
not feel. Recall that elsewhere he said, I know that I want to
produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they
need. Music that will uplift, and make them happy (Wilmer, 1962)
what music is to meits just another way of saying this is a big,
beautiful universe we live in, thats been given to us, and heres an
example of
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
175
just how magnificent and encompassing it is. (DeMichael, 1962)
Such quotes continue to paint a picture of motives quite the
opposite of anger.
It is possible that listeners misattributed the source of
Coltrane's music. They might have been unfamiliar with the sonic
language that Coltrane used. Perhaps the music was not as
intrinsically expressive as Arnheim contended music could be. It
was not easy to read accurately. Contrary to Arnheims contention
about music in general, it constituted a foreign language that
needed to be learned. Some collaborative support for this
possibility exists. Non-musicians most frequently label Coltrane's
tone quality as "rasping," "cutting," or "piercing" (Gridley,
1987). In factor analyses of perceptions, Charles Keil (1966) and
Charles Keil and Angelika Keil (1966) found non-musicians who were
interested in music to load Coltrane's music heavily on descriptive
factors such as "agitated" and "uncontrolled." So, if non-jazz-wise
listeners assumed, for instance, that beauty and lyricism were
evident only in tone qualities that they perceived as smooth and in
overall character that they did not find agitated or uncontrolled,
then they apparently felt Coltrane's expressions conveyed the
opposite. Their frame of reference was not congruent with
Coltrane's. This becomes comprehensible when we acknowledge, for
instance, that aspects of music considered beautiful in some
African cultures, such as roughnesses, buzzings and ringings, are
considered ugly in some Western cultures (Bebey, 1975). Just as fat
is considered beautiful in some cultures, thin is beautiful in
others. Whereas Gridley (1987) found Coltrane's timbre to be
frequently termed "rasping" and "piercing," which are perceptions
associated with judgments of ugliness in Western art music, a
number of jazz musicians and jazz fans have told the author that
they consider Coltrane's tone quality to be beautiful.
It is beyond the scope of the present study to examine the
acoustic aspects of Coltrane's playing that evoked anger
perceptions, but two streams of data are of particular interest:
(a) Juslin and Laukka's (2003) summary of investigations on emotion
perception of music found that listeners register anger from the
cues of high speed, loud dynamics, and rough timbres. This
resembles a speculation offered in Coltrane biographer Ben
Ratliff's interpretation of Gold's "angry young tenor" remark
(2007, p. 48).4 (b) Juslin and Laukka's findings differ
considerably from the findings reported above, in which 61 percent
of 355 student listeners reported that they perceived Coltrane's
very fast playing and loud, rough sounds as "friendly" (positions
1, 2, or 3 on the friendly-angry continuum), and 21 percent rated
the music as neither "friendly" nor "angry" (endorsing position 4,
which is the midpoint of the 7-point scale). This disparity
warrants further investigation.
Somewhat related to this last point, jazz musicians tend to
agree that Coltranes music is quite forceful, even insistent, but
not necessarily angry. In numerous contacts with jazz musicians and
jazz fans, the author has noticed that perceptions of exuberance,
not anger, predominate in response to Coltrane's saxophone
improvisations. The lack of anger perception has been evident in
far more than the 23 musicians who were informally interviewed in
the aforementioned study. Is this because jazz musicians are more
in touch with the creative process and consequently transcend
superficial aspects that non-musicians focus upon? Are jazz
musicians less likely to misattribute the source of an
improvisation? This echoes research findings about the automatic
human response of imitation that accompanies perception of
4 In a review of the Newport concert published in down beat
magazine, the writer Don Gold called this playing
angry; and to anyone who might have been taken aback by a black
man talking at length and with force, then, yes, such music could
have been the equivalent of angry speech. Ratliff, Ben (2007).
Coltrane: the story of a sound. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 48.
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Mark C. Gridley 176
anothers actions and emotions (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977;
LaFrance, 1982). Our brains have mirror neurons in their pre-motor
cortex that instantaneously energize our own capacity to do
ourselves what we imagine another person to be doing. We prepare to
do what we perceive in others (Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, &
Fogassi, 1996; Gallese & Goldman, 1998). This means that, for
example, if we hear someone engaging in rapid, high-pitched sound
generating, we unconsciously prepare for the same activity, even
though we may not execute it. Then unconsciously we also undergo a
process in which we infer the emotion that would accompany such an
activity (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Dijksterhuis & Bargh,
2001). In other words, our concept of mind is an abstracted form of
mimicry in which we create in ourselves concepts that match those
in anothers mind. In this case, a likely inference would be
distress because to generate such a sound sequence would typify our
own response to distress. The brains of non-musician listeners may
very well be engaging in just such a process, and that process
leads them to conclude Coltrane is angry because to imitate
Coltranes sounds would be to produce their own automatic response
to distress. Jazz musicians, on the other hand, have themselves
created just such sounds for reasons totally unrelated to anger. So
they do not have the perception of anger when they hear Coltranes
music.
As plausible as this neuropsychological reasoning may seem,
however, it is flawed for explaining misattribution as constituting
a negative function of experience and expertise. The proportion of
anger perceptions in our sample of veteran jazz critics (10%) did
not differ appreciably from that in our sample of professional jazz
musicians (4%), which in turn was only somewhat less than that in
our sample of college student listeners who were jazz-nave (18%).
The finding that anger perceptions occupied only small proportions
of the responses for each surveyed group is the main trend here,
not that the proportions in each group followed the level of
expertise in that group. Drawing distinctions between emotion
perceptions by these particular groups is not warranted with our
data because we polled only small samples of journalists and
musicians, though our sample of jazz-nave students was substantial.
If the amount of knowledge about jazz (as expected to highly
characterize veteran jazz critics) and expertise (as expected to
highly characterize jazz musicians) reduces misperception, then we
would expect anger perceptions of journalists and musicians to be
considerably more discrepant with the anger perceptions of
jazz-nave listeners. Yet only 18% of the jazz-nave listeners in our
sample perceived anger, which is only 8% higher than anger
perceptions among our sample of 10 veteran jazz journalists.
Because of the small sample sizes, we dare not conclude that the
journalists were much less inclined to perceive anger than were the
jazz-nave student listeners. Neither group was generally inclined
to perceive anger.
Alternatively, it is possible that Coltrane was creating sounds
which encoded the frustration of his intense technical strivings,
and that these sounds were perceived as angry rather than merely
frustrating. Recall that when he was asked about being termed an
angry young tenor in down beat magazines coverage of the 1958
Newport Jazz Festival, Coltrane said, If it is interpreted as
anger, it is taken wrong. The only one Im angry at is myself when I
dont make what Im trying to play (Gitler, 1958). It is equally
likely, however, that Coltrane was merely being cordial in response
to an offensive remark reiterated by a journalist.
The lack of congruent frames of reference and universal symbols
may account for some of the discrepancies here. Lacking experience
in this regard, did a few non-musicians, such as Gold and Goldberg,
assume it was fierce anger that they were detecting rather than
merely Coltranes fiercely striving for the notes? Though both
musicians and non-musicians detected passion, was it largely
musicians who recognized that the intensity of Coltrane's sound
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
177
reflected the passion of music making? (This distinction arises
again in the remarks of drummer Greg Bendian quoted below.) This
line of reasoning fails, however, because, as you may recall from
the survey results, only a few non-musician journalists interpreted
Coltranes passion of music making for anger. It is interesting to
note, however, that the percentage of jazz-nave student listeners
who perceived anger (18%) was considerably higher than the
percentage of jazz musicians who perceived anger (4%). This would
lean toward supporting the hypothesis that the lack of congruent
frames of reference may account for at least some of the
discrepancy between Coltrane's stated creative intentions and
listener perception of emotion.
The Coltrane interview transcribed above is far from an isolated
example of discrepancies between listener perception and player
intention. The following quotations are excerpted from an interview
conducted by jazz journalist David Sowd (1994) with Gregg Bendian,
the drummer for several avant-garde "free jazz" groups, including
those of saxophonist Peter Brotzman and pianist Cecil Taylor. In
his answers to Sowds questions, Bendian coincidentally addressed
several of the key issues in this chapter. Sowd had phoned Bendian
to ask about the music of the Peter Brotzman Trio.
Interviewer: It does often sound like rage is the primary
emotion that's being expressed. Bendian: Well, actually it is very,
very positive music. We are not angry, upset people, so
it's not really a protest music. But you can say it is political
music, because it's really trying to create an alternative
view, a very personal view. It's trying to celebrate the
individual, to show people that there is diversity and that there
are people who have other ways of looking at things. It's saying,
"Look, the individual is not going away, and the unique
idiosyncrasies of people are something to be enjoyed and
celebrated!"
The rage thing, I think, just comes from the fact that something
at such a high level of passion is, on the surface, associated with
anger. But when you hear a preacher screaming to his congregation,
is he angry or is he just impassioned about trying to get some kind
of idea across?
Interviewer: Why is there so much harshness in the sound?
Bendian: I think there are really different perceptions of beauty
in the world. And all I can
say is, "Don't assume anything." It's another kind of intensity,
another kind of sound. I don't think it's an ugly sound. It's a
jarring sound, like the sound of the drums and woodblocks and gongs
that are used in Tibetan meditation to jar people, perhaps to
another level of perception. Because there's the ability of music
to lull, but there's also the ability of music to jar.
Why do people like really loud, distorted guitars? Because
there's something visceral and exciting about it. And that's
certainly the same case with Peter's music. Note also that the
music of Albert and Don Ayler was frequently described as
angry,
particularly during the 1960s. (Aylers style influenced
Coltranes last style period as well as the playing of Peter
Brotzman.) When asked what emotion he and his brother had intended
to convey, Don Ayler said (Gridley, 1992), It was all about love,
not hate.
There may be listeners who believe that every action a person
makes reveals something about that individuals personality and
emotions. For them it may be tempting to psychoanalyze jazz
musicians by their individual style, even by their choice of
instrument. The musician who chooses to play flute, for instance,
may be perceived as less geared to aggression than the one who
chooses drums or trumpet. Degrees of masculinity and androgyny, for
example, are mirrored by favorites within instrument families
(Abeles & Porter, 1978;
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Mark C. Gridley 178
Griswold & Chroback, 1981). Caution is warranted, however.
Though some listeners may believe they "know" a jazz improviser
(partly though his choice of instrument, for instance), it seems
unlikely that listeners could accurately identify his momentary
emotions from his playing. This is because (a) his choice of notes
and rhythms is dictated largely by his style, not by his momentary
emotion, (b) what we are hearing is the result of an extremely
complex cognitive undertaking that is all-consuming in the moment
of improvisation, and (c) he might play differently depending on
perceived audience demands and influence of fellow musicians, not
just according to his momentary feelings.
CONCLUSION A number of reasons have been considered to think
twice before assuming a listener can
know a jazz improviser's emotions from his music. Performances
that are symbolic, or attempt to be symbolic, have questionable
reliability as modes of communication because senders and receivers
lack congruent frames of reference.
A. Is Emotion Conveyed? As suggested by the preceding data and
discussion, the task of sorting the various
interpretations of emotion in jazz improvisation can be
daunting. To begin, by evaluating the alternatives by logic alone,
there are several plausible answers to the question, "Is emotion
conveyed by jazz improvisation?"
1) It is, and the listener correctly identifies it. 2) It is,
but it is not exactly what the listener thinks it is. Jazz
listeners are prone
to mistake the passion of music making itself for anger or joy.
For example, perceived agony could stem just from the musician
wrangling mostly with the creative process, not his psyche. The
musician is internally grunting and groaning in trying to get the
notes right. (Recall that Coltrane speculated that some listeners
perceived anger when they heard him at the times when he had so
many ideas in mind that he was having trouble sorting them out. In
other words, listeners perceived the emotion of anger when it was
merely the intensity of Coltrane's creative struggle.) Or perceived
joy could reflect just the musician's pleasure at making music,
even though the musician is not really a happy person. (Perhaps it
is not without reason that in performing music, as in professional
sports, the job itself is termed "playing.")
3) It is, but the musician doesn't know it, yet the music
reveals it to the listener. (a) Coltrane might have been angry yet
didnt know it, whereas 18% of the jazz-nave listeners in the
present surveys and two journalists recognized it. (b)
Complementary to this is the possibility that non-angry listeners
filter out the signs of anger in Coltranes music because that is
how their personalities handle unpleasantness and/or (c) they might
have imputed their own happiness or friendliness onto music that
was intrinsically angry.
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
179
4) It isn't, but the listener thinks he detects it anyway,
thereby misattributing its motive or projecting his own feelings
onto it.
5) It isn't, because much jazz is not about emotion. What jazz
expresses is a sequence of "musical" ideas. What the listener hears
in them may give him a purely sonic experience, much as a sunset
gives him a purely visual experience. In other words, there may not
be a mind "behind it," as Arnheim (1974) remarked. Or it may be
merely that "music expresses itself," as Stravinsky said
(Stravinsky & Craft, 1962; p. 115).
B. Is Emotion Conveyed Reliably? No is the obvious answer to the
question, "Is emotion conveyed reliably by jazz
improvisation?" 1) No, because the improvisation is
multi-determined, and reliability is partly a
decreasing function of the number of possible causes. 2) No,
because the listening response is multi-determined, and it may have
little
to do with the actual music, particularly the "how" of the
performance that might best reveal a performer's emotion.
3) No, because jazz musicians and listeners lack a common frame
of reference. Jazz is not a universal language. We may be misguided
to even consider analogies to language.
C. Does Jazz Improvisation Communicate? We can also say, yes,
jazz improvisation communicates if, in the most fundamental
sense,
communication is achieved whenever uncertainty is decreased. Any
sounds heard have decreased the uncertainty posed by what preceded
them. Something is more than nothing. Sound has communicated,
though we cannot say what has been communicated. Next, if we equate
"communication" with "expression," we can say that all
improvisations are expressive, though again we cannot identify
exactly what has been expressed. To use this loose a definition of
expression is asking for trouble. However, to describe the content
of the experience with words may be impossible because its content
is unclassified, and jazz improvisation is not a language with
universally established conventions.
Problems arise when we attempt to link the sound of a jazz
improvisation with emotions as clear as joy and anger, depression
and agitation. The experience of music cannot be reduced to joy and
anger, depression and agitation, and it cannot be reliably
translated into the categories of emotions we routinely consider.
The experience of music is different than the experience of most
emotions. As Stravinsky said, the composition is something entirely
new beyond what can be called the composer's feelings (Stravinsky
& Craft, 1962, p. 115).
If music communicates, perhaps it best communicates feelings
that are unclassifiable. Or it merely communicates intensity,
motion or rest, roughness or smoothness.
Leonard Meyer (1967, p. 43) stated that music theorists and
academic critics have not generally esteemed the belief "...that
music depicts or evokes the concepts, actions and
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Mark C. Gridley 180
passions of 'real' extra-musical experience." In the present
discussion, we have seen that such low esteem is also well earned
for interpreting the sounds of jazz, though the opposite situation
prevails among some jazz journalists, fans, and a few musicians
themselves.
D. So What? Why is it important to know this? In the first
place, imputing inaccurate emotional
connection to the work of jazz improvisers may be disrespectful
to the improvisers and presumptuous. It certainly irritates the
musicians who are being publicly psychoanalyzed and possibly
misjudged.5 Secondly, it may be misleading to the reader of jazz
journalism, as evidenced by the studies which showed the biasing
effect that journalist remarks can have on listener perception of
emotion (Gridley & Hoff, 2010). Third, if such imputing
continues, it reinforces self-deception in listeners by allowing
them to remain convinced that they can detect a given players
feelings in his music. This permits them to overlook how their
interpretations are refracted through their personal inclinations,
perceptions and emotions, indicating only how they themselves are
feeling, not how the player is feeling. This was clearly
demonstrated in the two studies that paired perceptions of anger in
Coltranes music with scores of the listeners on measures of their
own trait anger (Gridley & Hoff, 2007; Gridley, 2009).
Fourth, musicians who believe they are in deep communication
with their audience might be mistaken. Fifth, the pursuit of
identifying a players emotions from his music may be futile because
music evokes sensations and perceptions that dont necessarily have
emotion names. If you could say it with words or affection or
violence, for instance, you wouldnt need music. To translate music
into emotion might be an ill-advised pursuit altogether. The
converse may be equally ill advised.
To recap the broader implications of the surveys on perception
of anger in Coltranes saxophone improvisations, we can say that the
question is not whether wordless jazz improvisation evokes
emotions-it certainly does. The questions are whether it conveys
emotion and whether it does that reliably. Is the particular
emotion that is evoked the same emotion felt by the jazz
improviser? Obviously the answer is no, or at least not always.
Does it do this the same for every listener? No.
5 Saxophonist Albert Ayler was so annoyed by LeRoi Jones
erroneously writing that his music was inspired by Black
anger and militancy about civil rights abuses that he went to
the apartment of Jones and told him the writing was really about
Jones, not about Aylers music. [Jones, LeRoi (1984). The
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. (New York: Freundlich,),
194-195.] Confronting opinion pieces by Frank Kofsky and Leroi
Jones in the liner notes of his albums, Coltrane prevailed upon his
record producer to begin issuing albums with nothing on their
jackets except photos, composition credits, and band personnel.
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Perception of Emotion in Jazz Improvisation
181
APPENDIX A
Perception of Emotion Survey Circle the numbers that best
indicate your perception of emotion in the saxophone solo
you heard on the recording. happy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 sad friendly 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 angry tense 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 relaxed enthusiastic 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 uninvolved lively 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 not lively
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