Civic jazz : American music and Kenneth Burke on the art of getting along

Jazz is born of collaboration, improvisation, and listening. In much the same way, the American democratic experience is rooted in the interaction of individuals. It is these two seemingly disparate, but ultimately thoroughly American, conceits that Gregory Clark examines in __Civic Jazz.__ Melding Kenneth Burke’s concept of rhetorical communication and jazz music’s aesthetic encounters with a rigorous sort of democracy, this book weaves an innovative argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in a democratic culture. Jazz music, Clark argues, demonstrates how this aesthetic rhetoric of identification can bind people together through their shared experience in a common project. While such shared experience does not demand agreement—indeed, it often has an air of competition—it does align people in practical effort and purpose. Similarly, Clark shows, Burke considered Americans inhabitants of a persistently rhetorical situation, in which each must choose constantly to identify with some and separate from others. Thought-provoking and path-breaking, Clark’s harmonic mashup of music and rhetoric will appeal to scholars across disciplines as diverse as political science, performance studies, musicology, and literary criticism. This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens rather than to practices of government. The primary inquiry explores what democracy requires of individuals, proceeding through two other inquiries: one into jazz music as a model for democratic interaction, and the other into Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical conception of art as experiential and potentially transformative. Jazz is often described as democratic. Kenneth Burke’s quite American rhetorical and aesthetic theory explains how that is so. For Burke, rhetoric prompts a sense of shared identity, a sense that follows from an experience that is like being taken through a story of a song. Among individuals who are jealous of their freedom, this way of change seems more appropriate, more fitting, than argument. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. This is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. The chapters in this book cycle through these inquiries, elaborating and improvising on them on each pass "Jazz is born of collaboration, improvisation, and listening. In much the same way, the American democratic experience is rooted in the interaction of individuals. It is these two seemingly disparate, but ultimately thoroughly American, conceits that Gregory Clark examines in Civic Jazz. Melding Kenneth Burke's concept of rhetorical communication and jazz music's aesthetic encounters with a rigorous sort of democracy, this book weaves an innovative argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in a democratic culture. Jazz music, Clark argues, demonstrates how this aesthetic rhetoric of identification can bind people together through their shared experience in a common project. While such shared experience does not demand agreement--indeed, it often has an air of competition--it does align people in practical effort and purpose. Similarly, Clark shows, Burke considered Americans inhabitants of a persistently rhetorical situation, in which each must choose constantly to identify with some and separate from others. Thought-provoking and path-breaking, Clark's harmonic mashup of music and rhetoric will appeal to scholars across disciplines as diverse as political science, performance studies, musicology, and literary criticism"--Provided by publisher