Output details

Jazzing a Classic: Hylton and Stravinsky's Mavra at the Paris Opéra

This article has a complementary relationship to output 3, investigating a distinctive subtopic. It focuses on an arrangement of Stravinsky’s Mavra made for Jack Hylton’s band, which, when presented at the Opéra in 1931, marked a notable yet unsuccessful attempt at ‘jazzing a classic’. The study combines detailed archival manuscript work with critical approaches to musical meaning, drawing on Fauconnier and Turner’s models of ‘conceptual blending’ and related theories of musical multimedia, to examine relations between classical music and ‘jazz’ through the prism of Mavra. Intrinsic musical ‘attributes’ of Stravinsky’s opera and Hylton’s jazz translations are compared and potential emergent meanings explored. The exercise identifies commonalities and discrepancies, revealing problems with the original, its reworkings and performances. By contrast with the critic Pierre Leroi, it is argued that the main issue is not so much one of stylistic mixture (‘confusion’) as of imbalance: ultimately, Hylton’s reading was insufficiently ‘jazzique’. The article has catalysed further work on classical-jazz relations including three papers: ‘(Re)Moving Boundaries? Debussy, Ravel, and the Lydian Jazz Theory of George Russell’, RMA International Conference, Institute for Musical Research, London (July 2010); ‘French Music and the Improvisation of the Modal Jazz Pianist Bill Evans’, Leeds International Jazz Conference (March 2010); and ‘French Music Reconfigured in the Modal Jazz of Bill Evans’, in Janne Mäkelä and Jouni Eerola (eds.), Jazz Chameleon: 9th Nordic Jazz Conference Proceedings [refereed] (Helsinki: The Finnish Jazz and Pop Archive, 2011), pp. 77-89, subsequently translated into Portuguese for Per Musi, 28 (2013), pp. 7-14.