SPRING-SUMMER 2025

Our title for this semester is: “Beginning with Jazz, Broadway, Rock and Roll—”

Our guide is a magnificent poem by Eli Siegel: “Hymn to Jazz and the Like” published in his book Hail, American Development, and also an Aesthetic Realism lesson Mr. Siegel gave to a Rock musician about the meaning this new and exciting style of music had for his life and for the world.

We’ll see how the music of Rock, Jazz, and Broadway—like music around the world and across the centuries—resolves in its technique the conflicts we have every day. “The resolution of conflict in self,” stated Eli Siegel, “is like the making one of opposites in art.”

Literally, we want to be like music! We want to be both free and organized. We want to satisfy our desire for the expected and the unexpected, for dissonance and calm. And we have a need—beautiful and ethical—to be fair to the world and our own most personal feelings at the same time. True music does this—whether it’s by Beethoven or the Beatles.

• May 11   What Is Sound? Does It Take a New Form in Jazz?

“By now it is felt that Jazz has added something new to the world seen as art. Further, it is felt that Jazz is continuous with Virgil,…with Berlioz…[and more.] Jazz is a new junction of the deep and the lightsome, the permanent and the unexpected, the continuous and the surprising.”

—Eli Siegel, note to “Hymn to Jazz and the Like”

• Jun 8   Surprise! And also: What We Can Count On—The Blues Show Reality Is Both!

“Something in you expected a note here, and it was there.
Something in you expected a note to be this way and it was that.”

• Jun 22   Folk Song, Broadway, Rock and Roll—A Good Time & Respect at Once!

“Ah, what a blessing in rowdy divinity Casey Jones is!”

• Jul 6   Bridging the Divide between “Popular” and “Classical” Music

“There’s Bach rock-and-roll, Mozart rock-and-roll, Victor Herbert rock-and-roll. The big principle is that if you listen to rock there seems to be the utmost pain and the utmost assertion.  And do you hear that in Bob Dylan?”

—Eli Siegel, from the Aesthetic Realism Lesson
to a Rock Musician

• Jul 20   What Does Beautiful Music Say about Our Sureness & Unsureness?

“Rock and Roll, you say something of geology and man’s uncertainty.”

• Aug 3   Jazz Goes Right & Jazz Goes Wrong—Is that Like Us?

 

• Aug 17   Students in the Class Present Papers