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This chapter presents a background of the current study. Jazz has become a facile metaphor for American democratic ideals, a paradigmatic instance of racial/cultural integration, and/or the most singular contribution of the United States to the world. This book was conceived, in part, as a response to those alternatives. Rather than confront jazz using a loose biographical approach or conventional musicological techniques, it instead focuses attention on the kinds of “interpretive moves” that performers and other participants in musical events make as they engage with music. The author seeks to understand how participants in the jazz scene, and especially musicians, construct and construe meaning in musical events. He focuses on the jazz scene in New York City, where he conducted fieldwork continuously between July of 1994 and December of 1995, and more sporadically, from 1997 to 2001. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The framings discussed in the previous chapters foreground the importance of attending to the details of a specific musical event via its nesting in successive frames—a scene, a blues aesthetic, ritual, space, time, tune, and form. They emphasize, as well, relating that single event to others and noting how each event is constituted by references and responses to others displaced in time and space. Building on those ideas, this chapter focuses on the ways that the work of different actors and institutions shapes musical events in recording studios or clubs. It analyzes three studio recordings and three live performances to illustrate the efficacy of seeing jazz through the lenses of a blues aesthetic and ritualization.

This chapter examines some of the meanings that emerge from jazz performance based on statements by musicians regarding their approaches to musical events and their interpretation and evaluation. Through identification of their common concerns, it proposes that they have developed and operate within the parameters of a set of normative and evaluative criteria called a “blues aesthetic.” In defining that aesthetic, the chapter explores its foundations in African American culture and other, parallel and competing, discourses and aesthetic formations.

Music as a revelation and as an education was frowned upon, and was only to be used as an accompaniment to conversation. However, in the last 50 years there has been a great change. The answer came ten years ago, a direction and guide to all this ferment, to satisfy those aspirations that lie beyond daily life, in the Third Programme. This is perhaps the greatest musical event that has happened in this country. England's Third Programme is at once the envy and the admiration of all. They are at last coming into their own and can stand as the leading spirits in the great hierarchy of art. Now, when their hopes are highest, suddenly the blow falls: the Third Programme is to be emasculated into impotence, and it seems that the Home Service is to follow suit.

This chapter illustrates the impossibility of musical cognition without memory. Cognition in music depends on the psychological process of preparing for what is to come by remembering what has already happened. Ernst Hans Gombrich has described this process as “forward matching,” whereby each new musical event is compared and contrasted to past ones. The ability to recognize repetition and variation is the key to cognition in music. It is an ability that requires the matching of new musical events with past ones. In contrast to the visual arts, music, like poetry, depends on memory, since scanning backward and forward in time is not possible. While poetry establishes meaning within the larger culture of language, music, unique among the arts, relies chiefly on self-reference to its own structures to establish meaning.

This chapter analyzes how Southerners experienced old-time records as musical events, especially compared to the folksongs that previously defined their musical lives. To address this question, recording artists consistently envisioned four major possibilities, alternately framing records as: (1) remote, stylized depictions of live music-making; (2) bona fide folksong performances in their own right; (3) self-contained musical events on a par with, yet distinct from, live performances; or (4) logical contradictions, whose relations to live music-making presented out-and-out paradoxes.

Yijing lays a foundation for classic Confucianism and classic Daoism. It presents the central concepts of yin and yang, an organismic worldview, change, unchanging principles, easy concepts, and simple operations. Humans are at the center in observing the universe, trying to understand it, to avoid adversity, and to promote prosperity. The author presents the phenomena of music and music education as explained by concepts found in Yijing. The yin and yang dyad can be applied to musical and music educational settings to explain musical motions, musical roles of individuals, and the natures of the musical activities and musical events. In music education settings, events are constantly changing due to changes in context, the teacher, and the learner, yet they are connected and synchronized.

This concluding chapter assesses the attribution of spatiality and timelessness to musical events. The novel experiences offered by the New and post-New Music have been the subject of considerable speculation concerning the temporality of postwar compositions and people's experience of “time” in general. These speculations have centered on two characteristics that distinguish the new music from the old: the spatialization of time and the experience of the moment as an autonomous, timeless, or eternal present. These notions already appeared in earlier discussions of structure and of meter conceived as cyclic return. There it was argued that the spatialization of time and the autonomy of a present freed from becoming are products of conceptualization. However, in postwar avant-garde aesthetics, these categories are adamantly applied to perceptual acts.

Psychology is commonly defined as the study of mental processes and behaviour. The main focus is on describing and explaining how people sense the world (perception), how they think (cognition), feel (emotion), and behave (action). Music psychology focuses on mental processes and behaviours that occur in connection with music: it aims to observe, and develop theories about, the processes involved in composing, performing, and listening to music. This chapter argues that at its core, the study of music and emotion is concerned with relationships between ‘musical events’ and ‘emotional responses’.The interface between them consists of psychological processes in the human mind. Thus, psychology is key to understanding how and why a listener goes from ‘sound’ to ‘significance’.