Swinging within the iron cage: The institutionalization of creative practice in American postsecondary jazz education

Socialization into jazz music in the United States throughout most of the 20th century took place outside of formal institutions of education: Musicians learned to play jazz mostly through emulation within the sites in which the music was performed or, with the dissemination of recording technology, by listening to previously recorded music. Currently, however, most neophyte jazz musicians in the U.S. are likely to receive their jazz training within academic jazz programs. These programs offer professional training in the form of a rationalized curriculum that is implemented through newly devised teaching aids such as instruction booklets and audio and video materials that have thus reconfigured the mode of the cultural reproduction of jazz music. Such conflation of modern organizational settings and the socialization into creative practice problematizes a division between art and the organizational infrastructure of modernity that scholars have come to expect since, first, the Romantic movement, which has objected to any routinization and formalization of the arts, and, second, Weber's sociological writings about rationalization, which have posited the disenchanted and formalized nature of bureaucracy. Against the background of these orientations, institutionalized art education in general, and postsecondary jazz education in particular, have been held to be a contradiction in terms by many scholars who have argued that creative thinking could not be cultivated within the institutional environment of the modern school.;Based on fieldwork in two American postsecondary jazz programs, Swinging within the Iron Cage provides an ethnographic account of the ways in which teachers and students negotiate the task of cultivating creative practice within the rationalized, bureaucratic, organizational structure of the university and its institutional paraphernalia of standardization such as curricula, syllabi, and tests. It engages with the rich context of postsecondary jazz education in order to explore how claims about and realities of immediation and mediation and creativity and institutionalization are created and negotiated within the everyday practices of jazz teachers and students, and what some of these claims' and realities' culturally specific determinants might be. The dissertation implodes prevalent accounts of the rise of postsecondary jazz education as an inevitable trajectory from creativity to cultural standardization and invites comparisons to other forms of negotiation between creative practice and modern organizational settings such as scientific innovation.