Alain Locke (1885–1954)
Autor(a) de The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance
About the Author
Obras de Alain Locke
The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art (1940) 17 cópias
Race contacts and interracial relations : lectures on the theory and practice of race (1992) 10 cópias
Negro Art: Past and Present 1 exemplar(es)
Survey Graphic: Color - Unfinished Business of Democracy, Negroes U.S.A. The New World / The Old World, November 1942,… 1 exemplar(es)
An exhibition of African art : the Baltimore Museum of Art, November first to November twenty-fourth, 1946 — Autor — 1 exemplar(es)
The New Negro: An Appreciation 1 exemplar(es)
Four Negro poets 1 exemplar(es)
The Critical Temper of Alain Locke : A Selection of his Essays on Art and Culture (1983) 1 exemplar(es)
The Negro and His Music 1 exemplar(es)
The new Negro an interpretation 1 exemplar(es)
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome de batismo
- Locke, Alain LeRoy
- Data de nascimento
- 1885-09-13
- Data de falecimento
- 1954-06-09
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- Local de nascimento
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Locais de residência
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Berlin, Germany
England, UK - Educação
- Harvard College (AB|1907)
Oxford University (Hertford College) (MA)
University of Berlin - Ocupação
- philosopher
writer
university professor
patron of the arts - Relacionamentos
- James, William (teacher)
- Organizações
- Howard University
- Premiações
- Rhodes Scholar
Phi Beta Kappa
Bowdoin Prize (1907) - Pequena biografia
- Philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance
Membros
Resenhas
Listas
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 18
- Also by
- 6
- Membros
- 561
- Popularidade
- #44,552
- Avaliação
- 3.9
- Resenhas
- 6
- ISBNs
- 37
- Idiomas
- 1
- Favorito
- 1
Black music achieved its own direction and development only in the 1890s. While Negro folk songs contained the unique expressions of Negro emotion, folk-wit and musical inventiveness, writes Locke, Negro musicians had to overcome the caricatures perpetuated by minstrelsy. Nevertheless, they built upon elements of rhythm and swing in the ‘coon songs’ to compose ‘raggin’ tunes’ for Negro cabarets in Memphis and St. Louis, and Negro music began to distinguish itself with its own peculiar idioms of harmony, instrumentation and technique. In Locke’s telling, jazz arrived with the 1912 “Concert of Negro Music” at Carnegie Hall, featuring James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra.
From a musicological perspective, jazz early in the 20th c. was both evolutionary and revolutionary, writes Locke. In terms of evolution,
…The jubilant spiritual camp-meeting shout contained the ecstasy and rhythms that characterized ragtime and blues, out of which developed jazz in the improvised breaks between choruses…the free style introduced by Negro musicians has generations of experience behind it in the voice tricks and vocal habits of Negro choral singing…out of the vocal slur and quaver between the flat and the natural came the whole jazz cadenza…
The revolutionary aspects of jazz, on the other hand, were technical: the agility of the music, the variability of tone over a broader range, the odd intervals, the variety of instrumental combinations and their myriad effects.
Already in the early-1930s, Locke sees jazz reflecting and complicating the perennial problems of race, modernism, and commercialization. In spite of its racial origin, jazz had become ‘one great interracial collaboration, in which the important matter is the artistic quality of the product and not the color of the artists.’ The ‘common enemy,’ he says, is ‘the ever-present danger of commercialization.’ Having left behind ‘its humble sources in the delta, the levee, the Memphis dive and barrel-house saloon,’ jazz was embraced as a symbol of hectic times, ‘an escape from the tensions and monotonies of a machine-ridden, extroverted form of civilization.’ After a Golden Age between 1922 and 1928, though, says Locke, jazz has become artificial and decadent. The vogue for sentimental song and dance has ‘spawned a plague, profitable but profligate, that has done more moral harm than artistic good.’ A cult of primitivism built up around jazz and warped the autochthonous emotional elements into a popular craze, and this ersatz concoction (‘public taste is a notoriously poor judge of quality’) spoiled the ‘organic trinity’ of rhythm, harmony and creative improvisation that made jazz unique. The Negro, finding his way into the mainstream of the culture at last, has both gained and lost.
The Negro, strictly speaking, never had a jazz age; he was born that way, as far as the original jazz response went. But as a modern and particularly as an American also, he became subject to the infections, spiritual and moral, of the jazz age. The erotic side of jazz, in terms of which it is often condemned, is admittedly there. But there is a vast difference between its first healthy and earthy expression in the original peasant paganism out of which it arose and its hectic, artificial and sometimes morally vicious counterpart which was the outcome of the vogue of artificial and commercialized jazz entertainment. The one is primitively erotic; the other, decadently neurotic.
Ten years after he promoted the New Negro, Locke sounds pessimistic about the future of black music. He shares with the ‘hot jazz’ aficionados a lament for the passing of a Golden Age, but his concerns emanate from an understanding of the music’s deep roots in the black American experience. For Locke, the decadence in jazz was a psychological blow to the Negro. If he had seen the future, he would have been reassured: black music in general, and jazz in particular, was nowhere near exhaustion. Benny Goodman probably wasn’t going to make him feel any better, but maybe Thelonious Monk would.… (mais)