{"id":7899,"date":"2023-10-11T19:33:23","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T00:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/?p=7899"},"modified":"2023-10-11T19:33:23","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T00:33:23","slug":"ferdinand-jelly-roll-morton-and-the-power-of-notation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/2023\/10\/11\/ferdinand-jelly-roll-morton-and-the-power-of-notation\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton and the Power of Notation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cJelly Roll Morton.\u201d 2019. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 2019. https:\/\/www.rockhall.com\/inductees\/jelly-roll-morton. \u200c<\/p><\/div>\n

Often referred to as one of the “fathers of jazz”, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton was one of the pioneering faces of jazz to come in the early 20th century.\u00a0 Born in 1890 in New Orleans, Jelly Roll was at the forefront of the burgeoning genre of jazz.\u00a0 By age 10, he was playing in bordellos blending ragtime, minstrel music, and dance rhythms: the basis of jazz1<\/sup><\/a>
\n.\u00a0 When he left New Orleans to travel the country as a musician, he often credited himself with the creation of jazz.\u00a0 While this claim was, and still is, disputed by many, it is impossible to deny that his tune, “Original Jelly Roll Blues”, was the first published jazz work.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana.\u201d n.d. Webapp1.Dlib.indiana.edu. Accessed October 12, 2023. https:\/\/webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu\/metsnav\/inharmony\/navigate.do?oid=https:\/\/fedora.dlib.indiana.edu\/fedora\/get\/iudl:384651\/METADATA&pn=3&size=screen. \u200cAccessed via Sheet Music Consortium<\/p><\/div>\n

Morton was far from the first to play and perform jazz, but publishing a work gave his claim serious credibility.\u00a0 To notate something is to is legitimize it, and that is exactly what Morton did.\u00a0 Many people of the time, especially white people, drew clear distinctions between jazz and classical music, high and low art, by the basis of their notation.\u00a0 To them, jazz was disorganized and sloppy when compared to the precise scores of orchestral works.<\/p>\n

So notation legitimizes, but is it always in the best interest of the music? Is something lost? In Morton’s score of The Jelly Roll Blues, he consistently uses dotted sixteenth notes tied to eighth notes to allude to a swing feel, but if a musician read the ink as-is, it would still be lacking.\u00a0 A true swing feel is subjective, and nearly impossible to fully quantify.\u00a0 By being forced to notate jazz, one “establishes the objectification of subjectivity”2<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In class, we’ve discussed the difficulty of transcribing some genres from Native music to Appalachian folk music.\u00a0 In his article, “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk”, we see the impossibility of accurately transcribing Tommy Johnson’s “Cool Drink of Water Blues” 3<\/sup><\/a>.\u00a0 The 32nd notes and triplet rhythms in the transcription surely wasn’t the true rhythm of the song, but it was the only way to quantify and notate it.\u00a0 While notation helps the legitimization and dissemination of music to the masses, it may not always be necessary.\u00a0 For oral\/aural traditions, notation and transcription removes an irreplaceable essence of the music.<\/p>\n

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1<\/a>\u201cJelly Roll Morton – Songs, Music & Facts.\u201d 2021. Biography. April 27, 2021. https:\/\/www.biography.com\/musicians\/jelly-roll-morton.\u200c<\/p>\n

\n

2<\/a>Marian-B\u0103la\u015fa, Marin. \u201cWho Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology.\u201d The World of Music<\/i> 47, no. 2 (2005): 5\u201329. http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/41699643.<\/p>\n

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3<\/a>Nunn, Erich. 2015.\u00a0Sounding the Color Line : Music and Race in the Southern Imagination<\/i>. Athens ; London: The University Of Georgia Press.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cJelly Roll Morton.\u201d 2019. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 2019. https:\/\/www.rockhall.com\/inductees\/jelly-roll-morton. \u200c<\/p>\n

\u201cIN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana.\u201d n.d. Webapp1.Dlib.indiana.edu. Accessed October 12, 2023. https:\/\/webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu\/metsnav\/inharmony\/navigate.do?oid=https:\/\/fedora.dlib.indiana.edu\/fedora\/get\/iudl:384651\/METADATA&pn=3&size=screen. \u200cAccessed via Sheet Music Consortium<\/p>\n

\u201cJelly Roll Morton – Songs, Music & Facts.\u201d 2021. Biography. April 27, 2021. https:\/\/www.biography.com\/musicians\/jelly-roll-morton.\u200c<\/p>\n

Marian-B\u0103la\u015fa, Marin. \u201cWho Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology.\u201d The World of Music<\/i> 47, no. 2 (2005): 5\u201329. http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/41699643.<\/p>\n

Nunn, Erich. 2015.\u00a0Sounding the Color Line : Music and Race in the Southern Imagination<\/i>. Athens ; London: The University Of Georgia Press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Often referred to as one of the “fathers of jazz”, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton was one of the pioneering faces of jazz to come in the early 20th century.\u00a0 Born in 1890 in New Orleans, Jelly Roll was at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1397],"tags":[36,251,601],"class_list":["post-7899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2023-mus-345-b","tag-early-jazz","tag-music-transcription","tag-western-notation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7jEhR-23p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7899"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7910,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7899\/revisions\/7910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}