Female Professor:
Individually, perhaps the best in the business . But thinking of Miles Davis as the leader of this group, how did he organize and manage all this incredible talent? Well, he’d lay out the general outline, the theme, and then give each of these star performers, one by one, the creative freedom to really show what they could do with it on their own instrument … to improvise and add something new, but always within the same general theme . So Miles Davis gets credit for recruiting the best jazz talent anywhere … and getting them to collaborate on a fantastic musical product. Everyone see the business parallels here? And give each of these musicians credit for seizing the opportunity and creating great individual performances. But good jazz is more than just outstanding individual performances, isn’t it? Definitely. Jazz musicians need to listen to each other and go with the flow. Like, one time, somebody goofed and came in a little early. But everyone else adjusted and went right along with it, as if nothing were wrong, and this mistake came out like just another … unexpected creative interpretation.
Male Student:
Female Professor:
Male Student:
Female Professor:
Thanks, George . Great insights … ones that would certainly apply to what we’re studying here .
Activity 10.3: Art History Lecture
Narrator: Professor:
Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.
All right, so last week, we started talking about the painters and sculptors who were part of the art movement called Dada. But I don’t want you to think the ideas we introduced last time were limited to painting, sculpture, that sort of thing . So today, I want to move beyond the visual arts and talk a bit about Dada in the performing arts, in theater. But let’s start by reviewing what Dada is, OK? As you’ll recall, Dada began in Switzerland, in the city of Zurich, in 1916. The artists who started it were reacting against traditional notions of uh—of beauty, of reason, of progress, which had been the standards of Western thought since the eighteenth century. They looked around and … well, I mean, the First World War was raging, so they didn’t see much beauty, reason, or progress in the world . Instead, they saw a world that was chaotic, random … a world that didn’t make sense . And if that’s the way the world was … well, they wanted their art to reflect that . So let’s—let’s review a couple of key ideas that were the backbone of Dada art . First, the Dadaists wanted to completely reject the Classical idea of art. Classical ideas like proportion, balance, all the things you think about when you think about great art . “Great art” involved the reason, the logic, the beauty that the Dadaists wanted to overthrow. So, uh, well, you know, to—to a Dadaist, Classical artwork was a reflection of outdated thinking . That’s why Dadaists created sculptures like the ones we saw last week . Remember the stool with the bicycle wheel mounted on top? I wouldn’t exactly call that beautiful, would you? But of course it wasn’t meant to be . That was the point . OK, so another key Dada idea we talked about was the embracing of randomness, right? Uh, if life is random, said the Dadaists, why would we make art that has order and logic? And so we have that collage we looked at where the artist took different, you know, cut-out squares of colored paper, threw them onto the canvas, and wherever they landed, that was the composition of the work . Another favorite of the Dadaists was something called chance poetry. A chance poet would pull words out of a hat, and that would be, well, that would make up the—the poem . And this idea of chance and randomness was a key element of Dadaism because the whole world seemed so random to them .
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