‘‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Grundgestalt!’’— Ellington from a Motivic Perspective Edward Green What is it that makes Ellington’s music so enduringly strong? One school of thought—the predominant school—highlights his technical mastery of orchestration and harmony. The sonorities are so striking, so right, so unique, that they seem in a category all their own. Billy Strayhorn came up with a phrase to describe it: ‘‘The Ellington Effect.’’ 1 And Andre´ Previn was quoted as saying: You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, ‘‘Oh, yes, that’s done like this.’’ But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is! 2 In this essay, I suggest the value of turning our analytic attention elsewhere—away from these timbral and harmonic wonders towards Ellington’s motivic procedures. 3 For while he has rightly received high praise for the first, more ‘‘sensual’’ aspect of his art, 4 the second aspect—the motivic—has been far less deeply explored. In fact, the claim that Ellington was a master miniaturist who lacked the ability to construct coherent larger forms has become commonplace. And it is a pity, for in Ellington’s motivic procedures (including such procedures in many of his extended compositions) there lies an even richer vein of evidence for the power and sophistication of his compositional imagination. The evidence can be summarized this way: in many of Duke Ellington’s best scores there is a subtlety of tonal organization, an ability to have an entire work grow (or appear to grow) from a core musical statement—or, rather, a ‘‘Grundgestalt.’’ This German term, coined by Arnold Schoenberg, is rarely encountered in jazz scholarship; certainly it lags behind various Schenkerian theoretical concepts, equally European in origin, which nevertheless have been 1 Billy Strayhorn, ‘‘The Ellington Effect,’’ Down Beat, November 5, 1952, 2; reprinted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 269–270. 2 Ralph J. Gleason, ‘‘Duke Excites, Mystifies Without Any Pretension,’’ Down Beat, November 5, l952, 18. 3 The first study dealing in depth with motivic integration in Ellington was Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen, ‘‘Black, Brown & Beige,’’ Composer 51 (Spring 1974), 33–37, 52 (Summer 1974), 29–32, and 53 (Winter 1974–1975), 29-32; reprinted in Duke Ellington Reader, 185–204. 4 A famous instance can be found in Gunther Schuller’s essay ‘‘Ellington in the Pantheon,’’ in which Schuller asserts that ‘‘Ellington’s imagination was most fertile in the realm of harmony and timbre.’’ Gunther Schuller, ‘‘Duke Ellington in the Pantheon,’’ High Fidelity, November 1974, 63; reprinted in Gunther Schuller, Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47–50. Jazz Perspectives Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2008, pp. 215–249 ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494060802373416 Use your browser's back button to return to EdGreenMusic.org