Department of Music

• Friday, December 3, 2010
• 107 Old Cabell Hall
• 3:30 p.m.
• Free

Luxe Pop: The Six Degrees of Separation from Jay-Z and the Hustler Symphony Orchestra to Symphonic Jazz

This paper considers the long-standing practice of merging popular music idioms with lush string orchestrations and other markers of musical glamor. Most orchestral pop involves “acts of conspicuous symphonization” through which both elaborate production and arranging contributions musically parallel the social practice of “conspicuous consumption,”wherein luxury goods/services are acquired for displays of social status or wealth. A modern slang term that conveys a similar meaning is “bling,” which refers to ostentatious lifestyle displays that involve ironic juxtapositions of street culture and high-status symbols of social power. An ideal example of “bling” display in music, fashion, and performance can be found in Jay-Z’s lavish 2006 concert at Radio City Music Hall with the Hustler Symphony Orchestra. There are rich connections between this event and the image constructions and music of earlier orchestral pop. To demonstrate such associations, this paper appropriates the pop-culture notion of “six degrees of separation.” Through this conceit, I trace a history of the “luxe pop” aesthetic from Jay-Z back to 1920s symphonic jazz, a seminal orchestral pop genre that “highbrow” critics frequently disparaged as the “essence of musical vulgarity” in its overloading of interwar pop with “gilded, exotic, orchestral effects.” I consider artists as diverse as Jay-Z, Frank Sinatra, Isaac Hayes, Burt Bacharach, and Tommy Dorsey, as well as various related manifestations of luxe pop idioms in radio and film. I will articulate how this aesthetic has ultimately accrued a range of social meanings that extend well beyond the original middlebrow aesthetics of symphonic jazz.

John Howland is associate professor of Musicology at Rutgers University. His research concerns the rich interconnections among popular culture, popular music, the jazz tradition, and American discourses on race, class-status, and culture. He is the author of Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2009), which traces African American contributions to the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s through 1940s.

(Presented by the University of Virginia McIntire Department of Music Critical and Comparative Studies. Co-sponsored by the American Studies Program.)