In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

360 CODES COLLAPSED
"pure music" and by claiming that jazz has a unique expressive capacity.
While this would seem to position jazz on the side of Authenticity, the
authors emphasize that the objects of reference for its "musical expressions"
are limited to emotions-in all their vagueness-and that, compared
to language, music is always characterized by a specific distance
from and looseness in the relation between signifier and signified: "Like
words, but to an infinitely greater degree, [musical expressions] are able
to escape their primitive meaning, to assume another meaning, to have
no meaning at all, or to wait until their context, whether sound or text,
has specified the exact sense in which they should be taken in a particular
case. Between them and their meaning, there is sufficient room for them
to translate, with equal indifference, a particular state and then another,
precisely opposite state ... We will always observe this lack of feeling
on the part of sound-terms for the meanings they take on" (Coeuroyand
Schaffner, 10-11). Unable to solve the conceptual contradiction inherent
in their argument (music is expression, but at the same time is not really
expression), the authors simply end up defining jazz through its connotational
relation with black ethnicity: "There the idea of expression aims
no longer at the character of the thing expressed, but at the more
generally ethnic tone in which two quite dissimilar things may be said"
(108). But as intellectually stimulating as such problems may be, they
show that the distinction between Authenticity and Artificiality is limited
in its applications. Instead of arriving at a clarifying description,
Coeuroy and Schaffner conclude by claiming that jazz is coextensive
with Life: "In vain will we close our ears to jazz. It is life. It is art. It is
the intoxication of sounds and noises. It is the animal joy of supple
movements. It is the melancholy of passions. It is ourselves today" (145).
[see Silence vs. Noise] If "being Life" means being everything, this final
statement is not an attempt at a definition but an indirect admission that
the phenomenon of jazz escapes all conceptualization.
Life has the strength of whatever is authentic-without being deep and
without being, on the basis of such depth, an expression of anything. But
Life also has the one-dimensionality, the intoxicating surface quality, of
Artificiality-without, of course, being artificial. Nothing is as concrete
and real as Life, yet Life eludes all subjective planning and order. [see
Immanence vs. Transcendence] Life thus becomes a value that is almost
obsessively attributed to whatever appears overwhelming and sublime,
to whatever lies beyond the reach of concepts and conceptual distinc-