Black Music’s Institutional Critique

To consider institutional critique within the music field requires some alteration of its fundamental terms, because music had developed a second aesthetic system surrounding Black art and had institutionalised it much earlier than modern or contemporary art had. This de-universalisation of the European fine arts has consequences for the theory of critique. Black music’s governing institutions in the 1960s were the recording label, the night club, the summer festival, and the mass periodical, and artists such as Charles Mingus, Bill Dixon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Alice Coltrane worked to confront, evade, and change them. Black musicians were more likely to build institutions than to destroy them, a mission shared by adventurous groups like the AACM and conservative ones like Jazz at Lincoln Center. The critique of traditionally racist cultural formations by historically oppressed people was often delivered through hard-won participation, not abandonment.