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Living Genres in Late Modernity
The publisher and the University of California Press
Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support
of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music,
established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti
and Michael P. Roth.
Living Genres in Late Modernity
American Music of the Long 1970s
Charles Kronengold
University of Califor nia Pr ess
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2022 by Charles Kronengold
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart), author.
Title: Living genres in late modernity : American music of the long 1970s /
Charles Kronengold.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2022005490 (print) | lccn 2022005491 (ebook) |
isbn 9780520388765 (cloth) | isbn 9780520388772 (paperback) |
isbn 9780520388796 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—United States—1971–1980—History and
criticism. | Popular music—United States—1961–1970—History and
criticism. | Popular music—Social aspects—United States—History—
20th century. | Popular music genres. | BISAC: MUSIC / History &
Criticism | MUSIC / Philosophy & Social Aspects
Classification: lcc ml3477 .k66 2022 (print) | lcc ml3477 (ebook) |
ddc 781.640973—dc23/eng/20220304
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005490
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005491
Manufactured in the United States of America
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Con t en ts
List of Musical Examples vii
Note on Musical Examples ix
Introduction: Listening for Genres 1
1 • Unengaging Histories: The Pop Song’s “More”
and Melancholy Democracy, 1968–69 43
2 • Space Issues: The Seventies-Soul Complex 89
3 • Exchange Theories: Disco, New Wave,
and Album-Oriented Rock 138
4 • Senses: Nocturnes among the Smaller Genres 171
5 • Forces: The Late-Modern Concerto 200
Afterword 249
Acknowledgments 257
Notes 259
Index 325
M usic a l E x a m pl es
Ex 1.1. The piano’s right hand signifies pop at the beginning of Esthero’s
2005 “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You).” 44
Ex 2.1. Anthony Jackson’s famously funky bass line, which opens
the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money.” 131
Ex 4.1. Elliott Carter’s 1978 Glock Birthday Fanfare presents fragments
from “Happy Birthday.” 177
Ex 4.2. “Happy Birthday,” transposed to correspond to the opening
of Glock Birthday Fanfare. 177
Ex 4.3. The opening of John Cage’s Nocturne for Violin and Piano raises
the question: What kind of piece is this? 181
Ex 4.4. The opening of Copland’s Midsummer Nocturne; the title
reflects—or helps produce—the late-modern nocturne’s
characteristics. 189
Ex 4.5. The opening of Ulysses Kay’s First Nocturne for piano. 190
Ex 4.6. The nocturne’s conventions saturate the score and paratexts
of George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening
(Makrokosmos III). 193
Ex 4.7. Four minutes into Earl Kim’s Earthlight the soprano speaks this
line as her spotlight dims and the piano’s chord decays. 197
Ex 4.8. In the final section of Earthlight the texture reduces to
b
a little canon on B , D, and E between soprano-plus-violin
and piano. 198
Ex 5.1. Morton Feldman’s 1975 Piano and Orchestra, mm. 1–5. 213
vii
Ex 5.2. At the end of Morton Feldman’s Flute and Orchestra (1978),
the soloist, an English horn, and a solo cello combine to slowly
present a complete chromatic scale. 224
Ex 5.3. The opening measures of Olly Wilson’s Akwan for piano
(doubling electric piano), amplified strings, and orchestra
(1972). 232
viii • M us ic a l E x a m pl e s
Not e on M usic a l E x a m pl es
In addition to the brief score examples that appear in this book, some score
examples are available on the University of California Press book page,
https://www.ucpress.edu/books. These examples are called out in the text
using the icon G. The website also has links to playlists. These playlists in-
clude most of the main audio examples discussed in the text; these too are
called out, using the icon . When the text focuses on a moment in the
middle of an audio example, the callout includes a time-point. In the spirit
of this book, there are additional playlists of “bonus tracks” for each chapter;
these contain representative works mentioned in the text or notes. These are
not called out in the text and need not be listened to in any particular order;
their aim is to deepen your engagement with the genres, people, and works
discussed in the chapters.
ix
Introduction
LISTENING FOR GENRES
What could make you care if a bass drum goes THOOM instead
of just thump? What’s the difference whether a concerto ends loudly or
quietly? What does it matter if a piece is called “Nocturne,” “Notturno,” or
“Nocturnal Sounds?” The musical genres discussed in this book gave sense
to such minor distinctions. Little instances of this-versus-that proliferated
across American popular music of the 1970s, shaping classic soul albums,
million-selling disco songs, and odd pop records. In Western art music, too,
subtle differences had outsized effects, which we can grasp in short birthday
pieces and expansive genres like the concerto. Popular or unpopular, these
genres relied on small details to connect people, works, practices, institu-
tions, resources, and ideas. Those connections were often fragmentary, un-
stable, and contingent; but they held, if only for a moment, and gave these
genres ways to face the world. The chapters that follow ask how these sorts
of connections happened and what they tell us. This means accounting for
a lot of music, some of which you may know about and some you may not
have heard of. It means trying to rehear the American 1970s through the
workings of its musical genres. And it means wondering what musical genres
are, and what they do.
Genres are good at making you care. They make things matter. They create
new kinds of differences, new roles for difference. Musical genres can do all
this in a variety of ways. This book listens hard to a half-dozen genres and
asks how: how have they changed musical experience, and what have they
added to the fabric of the world? It works comparatively, across these and
other genres, to show what 70s music can teach us about the relations among
people, genres, and works. It moves between popular and classical genres, big-
ger and smaller genres, and recognized and unrecognized genres in order to
1
demonstrate how musical genres of the 70s differ from one another—and
what they share. The book springs from a conviction that the cultural produc-
tions of the American 1970s present an extraordinary richness deriving from
how they played with genres and from the details their genres make a place
for. The American 70s created pressures and possibilities its musical genres
reflected. Seventies soul gave people new ways to imagine social space and to
engage with issues of the day. Disco changed how people made songs. Noc-
turnes of the 1970s gave new-music listeners reasons to think about moods
and the senses. Concertos of the 70s leveraged the convention of soloist-vs.-
orchestra to encourage people to listen harder. And so on. Listeners may have
glimpsed this richness at the time, but genre theory, then and since, has not.
We haven’t tried to say what this richness does, aesthetically and culturally.
This is partly because we haven’t listened to what American musics of
the 70s tell us: that musical genres are complex, messy, and dynamic. In-
dividually and collectively they add up to heterogeneous constellations of
phenomena. Genres are collections of works; sets of practices; comings
together of people; repositories of ideas, images, and conventions; ways of
interacting with spaces, technologies, and institutions; and much else. Put-
ting this another way, musical genres illuminate not just works, but people,
technologies, spaces, and everything else that makes up a cultural landscape;
they can serve as a bridge between individual aesthetic objects and larger
social structures. But they need to be experienced in all their multiplicity.
Experiencing the genres this book considers will mean emphasizing five
characteristics of musical genres in general—five basic aspects that define
musical genres and shape our encounters with them:
1. Genres are part of the material world. A genre fundamentally
depends on what is actually available to be experienced in the works,
events and practices that connect with it. Genres can’t be experienced
apart from their material existence: immaterial notions like “genre
rules,” irony, and minor-mode harmony need material features (like
recording studios, hairstyles, and synthesizer sounds) to hang on to.1 In
musical genres especially this encourages attention to the materiality of
sound, the materiality of body/brain processes, and the materiality of
spatial relations.
2. Genres can’t be experienced outside of time. Genres are ineradicably
temporal. It’s not just that genres like Philadelphia soul have historical
origins and unfold in historical time, and not just that their sonic
effects are necessarily time-based: they structure time in many ways,
from their slower rhythms of emergence, growth, and decline, through
2 • I n t roduc t ion
the temporalities of composition, rehearsal, production, performance,
and ordinary getting around, to the multitemporality of musical works
(form, phrase, meter, and so on), and the micro-rhythms of aesthetic
experience.2
3. Genres are irreducibly multidimensional. Genres interact with
works, practices, institutions, spaces, economies, technologies, conven-
tions, forms, images, and ideas; they impinge upon emotions, social
relations, modes of comportment, a range of stakeholders, and events
of many sorts.3
3. Each genre is a metagenre. Every genre establishes specific roles for
other genres, for all its dimensions, for the works that engage with it,
and for the concept of genre itself. Each genre proposes a system of
genres and ways of inhabiting this system.
5. Genres are subject to contingency. A genre happens but might not
have happened; it creates effects that might or might not be a pprehended
by a given person in a particular time and place; and it contends and
aligns with other forces in ungovernable ways.
All five of these characteristics favor multiplicity over generalizations, and
immanent features over abstractions. As such they cut against long-standing
assumptions about genres: that genres mostly classify works, that they can be
fully explained through historical accounts, that they’re best understood as
social practices, that they enforce rules and contracts, and that they can be
mapped in two-dimensional space.4 More importantly these basic character-
istics remind us that genres are entangled with forms of life that go beyond
the making and experiencing of art.
So why begin a book about musical genres of the 1970s with questions
about the small and unimportant? (A great deal of this music has had
broad aesthetic and social impact; a good bit partakes of the monumental.)
There are three main reasons. First, the musical genres of the 70s flooded
American cultural space with trivial details and fine distinctions. It’s worth
making room for all this stuff alongside what would seem to really mat-
ter: the things people care about aren’t always what’s important.5 Second,
details make it harder for us to abstract, generalize and simplify—which is
legitimately helpful when we’re dealing with practices and repertoires that
have been understood in reductive ways.6 And third: we will see that minor
details helped animate 1970s culture, and that works of the 70s often adver-
tise themselves as bearers of minute particulars. We’ll find that when these
genres grew large, when they explored big issues, when they pushed music
out into other realms of the social, they did so in and through little details.
L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s • 3
Hearing a Genre through a Fine Distinction
Take Parliament’s “The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean).” This nine-minute album
cut, the first song on side two of the million-selling LP Gloryhallastoopid
or Pin the Tale on the Funky, nurses a small distinction while calling atten-
tion to its very obsession with minutiae. It’s 1979, near the height of disco’s
popularity, but “The Freeze” delivers a funk groove that would seem more
at home much earlier in the decade. “CAN we get you hot?,” the female
backing vocalists sing crisply in unison, starting on the downbeat. They
wait about four beats, with the bass-line-driven groove underneath and
bandleader George Clinton’s spoken voice interjecting “Got me hot,” be-
fore they continue: “Can we MAKE your temperatures rise?” The backing
singers repeat this alternation for most of the song in continual call-and-
response with Clinton. [track 0.1] So if you were inclined to hear the
first question as merely rhetorical—the presentation of a dance-music cliché
with a little sexual suggestiveness rolled in—do you want to rethink your
response when you hear the second question’s more “precise” language? Is
the joke that you’re now encouraged to take the question seriously where be-
fore you just heard it as an exhortation? Or that the precision fails to clarify
the nature and source of the heat? What’s the difference?
About three minutes in, this double back-and-forth becomes truly funny.
As the female singers keep switching between their two questions, Clinton
uses his role in the call-and-response to draw attention to an even finer
distinction:
CLINTON: OK girls: “can we get you hot, may we make your”
BACKING SINGERS: Can we get you hot?
C: Say “may you” [sic] next time around
BS: May we make your temperatures rise?
C: Just the girls: “can we get you hot, may we make your.” Here we go, girls
BS: Can we get you hot?
C: Talk to me: “may we”
BS: May we make your temperatures rise?
C: One more time: “may we make your temperatures rise”
BS: Can we get you hot?
C: “May we”
4 • I n t roduc t ion
BS: May we make your temperatures rise?
C: Talk to me, talk to me, y’all
The song has shifted. First it emphasized an inexplicable oscillation between
a polysemic colloquial expression and a restatement in more neutrally de-
scriptive terms. Now it’s enforcing a strangely decorous insistence on proper
language use—but only half the time, and as the product of a gendered and
class-inflected give and take. The funky groove could be heard as the bed-
ding for these exchanges, or as the record’s raison d’être. What kind of song
is this? What has it invested in and what is it trading on?
“The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean)” is a late-seventies funk record. But it sticks
closely to James Brown’s groove-oriented output of 1965 through 1974—so
much so that it can be heard as an homage. “The Freeze” shows many key
aspects of Brown’s funk style. It’s a long, bass-line-driven song featuring
call-and-response; a lot of the material undergoes frequent repetition. The
rhythm guitarist, bassist, and drummer perform a groove that places weight
on the downbeats and injects syncopation everywhere else.7 They do so with
a funky feel that may reflect the contributions of Brown alumni like Bootsy
Collins and his brother Catfish.8 “The Freeze” takes the form of Brown’s
extended funk songs. It has a four-measure introduction that comes back
twice; about 80 percent of its length is devoted to the basic two-measure
groove; and it has a contrastive bridge. The sound of the recording is rather
dry and thin by comparison with contemporary radio and dancefloor fare;
the drums, especially, seem more like early-seventies funk than late-seventies
disco. Maceo Parker, Brown’s best- known saxophonist, weaves ad- libs
around the vocal call-and-response. Even the song’s title gestures toward
Brown. This sort of definite-article-plus-noun title conventionally names a
dance type; Brown employed this convention often, while Parliament (and
related groups like Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band et al.) did so nowhere
else. The puzzling parenthetical too recalls a titling gambit Brown used
increasingly across the 70s. And the interchange between Clinton and the
“girls” reflects both the quirky and the objectionable in the gender and class
politics of Brown’s on-and offstage dealings with his employees.9
If funk were nothing more than groovemaking in the James Brown man-
ner we could stop here. But that was never true—certainly not of Brown’s
varied output, which included many funky pop originals and funked-up
pop covers along with funk-inflected soul ballads, bluesy instrumentals,
L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s • 5
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