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The Poetic Mingus and the Politics of Genre in String Quartet No. 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2015

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Abstract

In 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned new musical settings of poems by Frank O'Hara for a concert honoring the late poet. Among pieces by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, the program featured a new work by Charles Mingus: his String Quartet No. 1. Mingus's piece was performed only once, at that concert, and was never recorded. It survives only in manuscript form.

String Quartet No. 1 thwarts nearly all expectations of a piece by Mingus. Scored for strings and voice, the work's modernist approach to rhythm and pitch is unprecedented for the composer. Mingus chafed at being categorized as a “jazz” composer, and String Quartet No. 1's style is both a bid for and an undermining of the prestige of the high art world. Faced with primitivist discourses that characterized jazz musicians as unschooled and nonverbal, Mingus deployed poetry as a mode of resistance. He worked with poetic texts throughout his life, often writing the poetry himself. Mingus's sensitive setting of O'Hara's text in String Quartet No. 1 points to the centrality of poetry to Mingus's artistic and political project, and suggests that the piece's anomalous style can be partially understood as his response to O'Hara's text.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2015 

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References

References

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Williams, Richard. “Mingus: The Clown's Afraid Too.” Melody Maker, 12 August 1972.Google Scholar
Yaffe, David. Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sy. Interview by author. 11 November 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mingus, Sue. Email to author. November 2007.Google Scholar
Charles Mingus Collection. Music Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Charles Schwartz Papers. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Whitney Museum of American Art. Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Performance Series Archives. New York, NY.Google Scholar
“3 London Editors Free in Smut Case.” New York Times, 10 August 1971.Google Scholar
Carmichael, Thomas. “Beneath the Underdog: Charles Mingus, Representation, and Jazz Autobiography.” Canadian Review of American Studies 25/3 (Fall 1995): 29–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Literary Ellington.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. O’Meally, Robert G., Edwards, Brent Hayes, and Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 326–56. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Farrington, Holly E. “Narrating the Jazz Life: Three Approaches to Jazz Autobiography.” Popular Music and Society 29/3 (July 2006): 375–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feather, Leonard. “Joni Mitchell Makes Mingus Sing.” Down Beat, 6 September 1979.Google Scholar
Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gioia, Ted. “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth.” Musical Quarterly 73/1 (January 1989): 130–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleason, Ralph. “Charlie Mingus: A Thinking Musician.” Down Beat, 1 June 1951.Google Scholar
Goodman, John F. Mingus Speaks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffith, Jennifer. “Mingus in the Act: Confronting the Legacies of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy.” Jazz Perspectives 4/3 (December 2010): 337–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Allen. “Composers Honor Frank O'Hara with Vocal Works.” New York Times, 28 April 1972.Google Scholar
Lewis, Anthony. “Britain Tightens Obscenity Curb: Court Rules Single Item Can Send Editor to Prison.” New York Times, 6 November 1971.Google Scholar
Lewis, George E. “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970–1985.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. O’Meally, Robert G., Edwards, Brent Hayes, and Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 50–101. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Mingus, Charles. String Quartet No. 1, n.d. Box 23, Folders 2–5. Charles Mingus Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Mingus, Charles. “The Critic—String Quartet,” n.d. Box 32, Folder 12. Charles Mingus Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Mingus, Charles. “What Is a Jazz Composer?” Liner notes to Let My Children Hear Music. Columbia, 1972, LP.Google Scholar
Mingus, Sue. Tonight at Noon: A Love Story. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.Google Scholar
“Mingus Is Back after 10 Years.” Amsterdam News, 5 February 1972.Google Scholar
Monson, Ingrid. “Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation: Irony, Parody, and Ethnomusicology.” Critical Inquiry 20/2 (Winter 1994): 283–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.Google Scholar
Porter, Eric C. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Priestley, Brian. Mingus, a Critical Biography. London: Quartet Books, 1982.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II: 1941–1967, I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Rustin, Nichole T. “Cante Hondo: Charles Mingus, Nat Hentoff, and Jazz Racism.” Critical Sociology 32/2–3 (March 2006): 309–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rustin, Nichole T. “Mingus Fingers: Charles Mingus, Black Masculinity, and Postwar Jazz Culture.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1999.Google Scholar
Santoro, Gene. Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Saul, Scott Andrew. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Charles. “Letter from Charles Schwartz to Sonny Rollins,” 25 September 1968. Box 8, Folder 10. Charles Schwartz Papers. New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Washburne, Christopher J. “Latin Jazz, Afro-Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Cubop, Caribbean Jazz, Jazz Latin, or Just . . . Jazz: The Politics of Locating an Intercultural Music.” In Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, Ake, David, and Goldmark, Daniel Ira, 89–110. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Washington, M. Salim. “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now’: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. O’Meally, Robert G., Edwards, Brent Hayes, and Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 27–49. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Williams, Richard. “Mingus: The Clown's Afraid Too.” Melody Maker, 12 August 1972.Google Scholar
Yaffe, David. Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sy. Interview by author. 11 November 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mingus, Sue. Email to author. November 2007.Google Scholar