Check out the Lit Chat posting “Standards, Forgotten Works, Victory Dance” and post your response here!
Abena, I am VIBING to this song! Thanks for the intro to Ezra Collective, and your redefinition of canon. Being someone who was trained in theology and ethics, I always felt a bit resentful about “the canon”–and who gets considered worthy of continued conversation. And while I definitely think many canons should be revised and expanded, I felt like I could breathe within your definition compared with jazz standards. It really echoes something that seems so essential to your writing and your work: how standard/canon is judgded based on how much of an invitation to innovation it lends.
I remember when my advisor, in frustration with my frustration about the canon, tried to say something along the lines of “learn the notes, then you can improvise.” But as a musician who has played Arabic and Indian classical music, I thought about all the tones that Western equal tuning cannot even create (ones that jazz musicians also know that exist in between formal notation). Then again, even the philosophical conversations that traveled along with said musical traditions have given and taken influence from works like Plato, Aristotle,etc–and now that I’m thinking about it, musical systems of ancient Greece would find equal tuning a very foreign concept as well! I think this helps clarify my issue with the canon: when a contemporary interpretation closes conversation in the name of “sticking to the classics” without recognizinng the power dynamics at play around preservation.
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@Leigh_Greening, so beautifully said! I like your distinction between a canon based on how much it lends an “invitation to innovation” versus canon simply because the work itself is chosen for inclusion by those who with the power to decide what will and will not be respected and celebrated.
Your example of music in non-Western traditions makes me think also of unconventional or non-Western literary techniques such as the Japanese kishōtenketsu plot structure that is completely different from the traditional five act structure in Western storytelling. The “outside the box” thinking is also why I like hybrid writing so much, and I enjoy reading works that inspire new ways of thinking about language and life.
Thanks so much for sharing your insights and joining the conversation!