Summary
Dominique Pagani first approaches jazz through its birth. Born of servitude and of the "tragic collision" of the slave trade, it comes from the Protestant chorale "sung out of tune" by African slaves. The result is a harmonic invention, in which major and minor coexist, as much as a rhythmic one1. He calls it an "always already complex" genre, fed by work songs, blues, musical-comedy standards and ragtime. The bop musicians wrested a learned music from it through hard struggle2. He sets it against globalized "people" music, frozen in a flattened metre: jazz makes up for a simple rhythmic framework through harmony and improvisation, as Miles Davis's "wrong note" in Autumn Leaves makes audible3. He rejects the division between an improvised jazz and a written classical music, since Bach, Mozart and Beethoven improvised. He places what is specific to jazz in collective improvisation on a double scale4. In 2022, he suggests that jazz may be the only true classical music of the twentieth century, because it holds both the popular bass and the avant-garde, with John Lewis and Lennie Tristano5.
- 1Discussion with Aliocha Allard (29 March 2017)26 Feb 2019
- 2#6 The jazz variation… by Beethoven15 Dec 2020
- 3#4 Sound ghettos3 Dec 2020
- 4From Bach to the Pygmies22 Jun 2022
- 5John Lewis: classical or jazz?29 Jun 2022
Introduction produced automatically from the 20 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 20 videos
Cycle 13Sickness, misfortune, evil
20 Sept 2024How is evil, under the figures of misfortune, illness and suffering, linked to autumn and finitude, and how can it be overcome?
Readings on the spotNietzsche, or the Great Ninny
7 Feb 2023What do two paragraphs of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil reveal about the music to come and the German soul?
Cycle 10#16 Michel Clouscard: “There are no holidays in the concept!”
7 Jul 2022What does Clouscard's quip "there are no vacations in the concept" mean, and how does philosophy make problematic habitual concepts such as "climate disruption" or "the West"?
Pagani Parle MusiqueJohn Lewis: classical or jazz?
29 Jun 2022Does John Lewis's music belong to classical or to jazz, and is jazz not the true classical music of the twentieth century?
Pagani Parle MusiqueFrom Bach to the Pygmies
22 Jun 2022Do the common divisions between tonal and modal music, learned and popular, classical and jazz hold up to scrutiny?
Cycle 10#14 Caves of yesterday and today: from Plato to modernity
10 Jun 2022What remains invariant, beneath their apparent discontinuity, in Dominique Pagani's talks?
Pagani Parle MusiqueFree gold for everyone: Mulligan
8 Jun 2022How should one listen to a baritone saxophone solo against a big band, using the landmarks of jazz history and the range of the instruments?
Questions and answersWagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?
31 Mar 2021How should one answer public questions on interpretations of Wagner's Ring, on how to enter Clouscard's work, on political philosophy, and on what Marx brings to the reading of Phèdre?
Musicosophie#17 Interpretation
25 Mar 2021What does it mean to interpret a musical work, between improvisation, execution and the restitution of the composer's thought?
Musicosophie#11 Modal and tonal music
24 Jan 2021Why did tonal music, a recent exception on a musically modal planet, appear and develop so quickly in what is called the West?
Musicosophie#7 The Greeks, myth and music
17 Dec 2020Why do Greek art, myth, and music, tied to a past that is gone, still give us aesthetic pleasure?
Musicosophie#6 The jazz variation… by Beethoven
15 Dec 2020What distinguishes genre from form in music, and why is the so-called "jazz variation" of Beethoven's opus 111 not jazz?
Musicosophie#4 Sound ghettos
3 Dec 2020How does the "people" music born in the 1950s enclose young people worldwide in sound ghettos, and how can one escape it?
Cycle 7#3 Harnessed to confinitude
4 Apr 2020How does romanticism, the first expression of modernity, express the unhappiness of absolute knowledge, and how can one escape it through a collective subject?
Other videosLa Fausse Note, a film by Aliocha
26 Feb 2019Why is globalized, repetitive and binary music, broadcast everywhere since the 1950s, a music of enslavement and amnesia?
Cycle 2#2.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?
1 Aug 2017What path did the workshop "Between Crisis and War: Philosophizing?" follow, from the definition of philosophy to the passage to the philosophy of action?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachHegel on the Beach 5/5
2 Feb 2016How does aesthetic appearance, down to the gleam of a look, express the material and historical richness of a world, and why does recognition between subjects pass through the thing?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachMarx on the Beach 2/2
1 Feb 2016What gives a commodity its value, and how is surplus value at the core of Marx's analysis?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe music of history
26 Apr 2015What does music teach us about the history of peoples, once we have defined what is properly musical in music?
A Philosophical AlphabetB for Bach
16 Dec 2014What brings baroque music and rock together, and what does this connection reveal about the relationship between popular and learned music?