Week 12: Wilf

What problems does Wilf find with the teaching of music in professional schools?

According to Wiilf, Jazz training has suffered from its introduction into the academic program. He argues that knowledge has become increasingly abstract, disseminated though method books and other pedagogical aids that transmit standardized information about jazz, and inculcated by professional educators who lack the experiential authority of a great artist because most of them acquired most of their knowledge by attending the same schools in which they now teach rather through extensive firsthand experience with the past masters.

When Wilf tells how Jazz was developing in old times, it reminds us a classic craftman system. The craftsman (master) would get a young pupil, and teach him/her how the work should be done. This system is actually very good because a real master would only teach the necessities. With this, the pupil can be more open minded, and also pupil wouldn`t need to know unnecessary knowledge. But even more importantly, a good master would share with the pupil, one´s own very interesting tricks, or very crucial informations. These are always the real education for students, and a student can only learn these next to a good master. In Academia`s, we find very crucial 2 problems. I believe that the first one is, a student sometimes must learn too many unnecessary and unrelated information. Second is the issue of masters. As Wilf mentions in his essay about jazz, I would also agree completely for classical music; There are much more students of classical music than the audience. This actually means that in a way, students are also an audience. Because of this unpopular atmosphere, there are only few masters who are really good and should educate some students, but of course, because they are one of the few people, it is most of the time impossible to reach them, or they are on touring in the world. So, who are the professors in these academies then? My answer must be, unfortunately, no one. In our days, except the 3-4 best schools in the world, professors of the academies are only very normal human beings, who have no professiaonal experience, neither knowledge nor stories, but only diplomas, which they have gotten from their own professor; who was probably one of the same insufficient humans.

In his book, the author uncovers the complexity that revolves around institutionalised Jazz training. The controversy is whether it is possible for Jazz to flourish with creative agency, whilst framing it in normative ideals of institutionalised rationality. The problem is how could the academia teach Jazz culture in rule-governed laws whilst still encouraging improvisatorial freedom. The author zooms in on to render two cases studies. He reconciles the paradoxes of student and educator who adhere to Jazz tradition and ideals, but at the same time feed their creativity as artists. Today it is becoming more difficult to see uniqueness in the alumni of the many Jazz school across the United States, because of the rule-governed techniques that the students are bombarded with. However, the author argues that these techniques are essential and feed creative practice that are both formal and informal.

On another note, Wilf discusses two different "faces of modernity" (p. as a basis for his arguments about Jazz. The first views modernity as a movement towards increased rationalisation that stems from Enlightenment ideals. Max Weber famously invigorated this view when he spoke of modernity as disenchantment from spirituality and religion. The second view links modernity to creativity and expressivity and individualism that emerged in the Romanticism era. Both views relate to different eras in history that still shape our modern world, and specifically the institutional Jazz scene. In this book, Wilf harmonises the two contradictory views of modernity that exist in the academic art world which are often deemed irreconcilable.

I did not mean to type in a cool emoji with sunglasses, but to refer the quotation to (page eight) that automatically turns into an emoji when typed here.