On Musical Value: John Lewis, Structural Listening, and the Politics of Respectability

In this article, I reveal the ways in which musical value, as marked by methods and places of listening, is intricately connected to race. I focus on John Lewis in his role as pianist and artistic director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, an African American jazz group formed in 1952 with members Milt Jackson (vibraphone), Percy Heath (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums) (replaced by Connie Kay in 1955). To understand Lewis’s approach toward listening and place with the quartet, I explore the concepts of structural listening and the politics of respectability. European modernists Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor Adorno privileged structural listening, a mode of listening highlighting concentration on structure and form, in the process of aligning musical and social value. The equation of musical and social value resulted in a privileging of whiteness in three aspects: (1) musical genre; (2) places of musical performance; and (3) modes of listening audiences engaged in. I argue that Lewis privileged musical values stemming from the European classical music tradition. While others have argued that doing so demonstrates Lewis’s engagement in a broader politics of respectability at mid-century, I interrogate the inherent disconnect between the musical values of structural listening and respectability politics.