The free place: Literary, visual, and jazz creations of space in the 1960s

The 1960s are typically considered in relation to the decade's vast political leaps, from the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to his assassination, the onset of the Vietnam War to the explosion of anti-war protest, the development of a massive political movement in support of African American Civil Rights to the rise of "Black Power." This dissertation takes a different tack on the 1960s, singling out a handful of artists working in different media who envisioned and integrated key concepts of the era into their aesthetic models, forever altering African American arts. The notions of space and time in these artists' production shifted considerably. What binds the non-musical works together is the centrality of music. This study seeks to understand the aesthetic shifts and explore the ways music transformed literary and visual aesthetics and integrated political realities and concepts that the Civil Rights era advanced. These issues include some of the most basic subjects of the modernist era, specifically space and time. Nothing was more important than space in the physical realm, since the Brown v. the Board of Education decision in 1954---and Civil Rights legislation afterward had mandated that African Americans could not, on the basis of race, be forbidden access to previously restricted spaces. Legislation and case law notwithstanding, African Americans were still denied equal access to many spaces, and thus, a musical vision came to imagine newly the space of performance. Similarly, time became a pivotal concern, linked with space in aesthetics by the increasing desire to incorporate tradition and history into expression, even to insist on the protophysical presence of ancestors.;This study inquires into the 1960s-era work of three main artists: novelist James Baldwin, painter Romare Bearden, and pianist/composer Cecil Taylor. It also investigates intellectual precursors for African American artists in the era, especially novelist Ralph Ellison, as well as artists whose works show the undeniable impact of key developments in the era on later novelists like Toni Morrison and Thulani Davis. Music played an elemental role in the development of 1960s aesthetics, allowing a point of reference, the basis for narrative improvisation, and even the subject matter for varying artists. It is precisely in music that sweeping changes occurred with the evolution of the jazz avant-garde, which took one of the century's foremost popular musics and steered it toward the fringe, albeit with an underlying philosophy that found the music's gist far more populist than it was in the marketplace. It is this music that figures prominently in this study, since Baldwin, Bearden, and Davis all work with music at the heart of their aesthetics. The study aims to bridge gaps between traditional critical disciplines---specifically cultural studies, social criticism of music, and literary criticism.