Ornette Coleman, the unnotable: transcription, historiography and incomprehensibility
In this paper, I want to discuss Ornette Coleman’s compositional practice. Gunther Schuller is my historical interlocutor.
In the foreword to the 1961 publication of his transcriptions of Coleman compositions, Schuller is frustrated with Coleman’s ‘improper’ compositional writing: “Mr. Coleman never learned to read or write conventional musical notation correctly” (Schuller, 1986, p. 80). Schuller’s frustrations manifest a hegemony of musical epistemology where composition is understood and judged from the vantage point of ‘proper’ and legible writing within a system of comprehensible staff notation. But Coleman’s musical thinking exceeds the frame of “order and logic” that Schuller seeks in compositional writing (Schuller, 1986, p. 23).
Schuller’s engagement with Coleman is however not simply dismissive: he was an early admirer and ardent supporter of Coleman’s music. Instead, what their relationship shows is the problem of the segregated historiographies of music in the 20th century (Treitler, 1996). In this paper, I read their encounter in transcription as a historiographical problem of 20th century experimentalism. Schuller’s frustrations with Coleman’s musical thinking and its blurring of composition and improvisation highlight the racialised policing of genre borders in the history of 20th century composition at large (see Kisiedu and Lewis, 2023).
In my discussion of their encounter, I theorise Schuller’s comments about Coleman’s ‘improper’ writing and Schuller’s publication of ‘proper’ transcriptions of the compositions as a form of (White) paternalism (see Hartman, 2022). It must be said that Schuller was partly aware of the politics of transcription and the shortcomings of musical analysis—in many instances, he acknowledges the necessary failures of a “capture in notation” (Griffin, 2004; Crichlow and Gilroy, 2022). He refers to this as the “unnotable” aspects of jazz performance (Schuller, 1986, p. 5). By deconstructing Schuller’s wider commentary on jazz history and notation, I carve out this idea of ‘the unnotable’ as crucial to Coleman’s musical thought and grammar. The ‘unnotable’ is here not to be confused with ‘not noteworthy’ but rather designates the impossibility of notating, naming, grasping and objectifying. What Fumi Okiji writes with regards to jazz experimentalism more generally can be heard also in Coleman’s ‘unnotable’ performance: “[i]ncomprehensibility, deep meaning, and incoherence are the markings of black radicalism” (Okiji, 2018, p. 81).
Ornette Coleman’s music invites a questioning of 20th music historiography by problematising composition as a form of legibility. If in Coleman’s compositional practice notational hegemony crumbles, I wonder: how do we attune to musical thought outside of “capture in notation”? And what does a musical theory of ‘the unnotable’ look and sound like?
Keywords: composition, notation, historiography, musical thought, Black studies
Biography
Malte Kobel is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His work engages critically and theoretically with questions of musical aesthetics, experimental musics, voice and performance studies. Malte is currently working on a postdoctoral project around Ornette Coleman’s musical thought, focusing on questions of composition, sociality and music as philosophical practice.
Previously, he was a lecturer at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded a PhD from Kingston University London for the thesis “The musicking voice: performance, affect and listening” in 2022.
Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, United Kingdom – malte.kobel@gsmd.ac.uk