DISSERTATION ABSTRACT

Raleigh K. Dailey
Folklore, Composition, and Free Jazz:
The Life and Music of John Carter
(2007)

The music of John Wallace Carter (1929-1991) demonstrates a confluence of musical styles unique to the American musical experience. Carter’s music encompasses several styles of American jazz, the blues, folk traditions, and contemporary classical music. His music also displays an interest in diverse musical techniques, including long-form composition, improvisation using various degrees of freedom, and extreme technical virtuosity. Although known today primarily for his work as a clarinetist, Carter was an influential educator as well as a composer of uncommon stylistic range. His ensemble works are steeped in the jazz tradition but draw from well beyond it; they display an interest in extended forms, the roots and heritage of jazz music, African American history and mythology, and the social experience of African Americans in the United States. Carter’s central work is the five-part, programmatic Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Music (1982-89), which chronicles the history of African Americans from the coast of Africa to the New World. This piece is one of the longest single works in jazz history, drawing from both cultivated and vernacular traditions in American music.

The hypothesis of this dissertation is that John Carter’s extended works reveal an unexplored middle ground in free jazz between improvised and composed music. The object of the current study is to evaluate this thesis by exploring the varied sources of this balance and by demonstrating the various musical techniques used to achieve it. A biographical study from a musical perspective will examine the ways in which his various roles as composer, performer, and pedagogue interact and inform his approach to composition. An analysis of Roots and Folklore (with particular emphasis on the second suite, Castles of Ghana) will explore relevant musical issues such as musical technique (harmony, melody, rhythm, form), the relationship between composed and improvised material, and stylistic considerations particular to avant-garde jazz. Other works of similar scope and intent will be discussed to determine the extent to which Carter’s contribution is unique.