| Abstract [eng] |
This research, based on the insights of theories in the field of music and literature, tries to answer a twofold question: how and why did Langston Hughes use jazz music in his poetry? The theoretical part helps to understand why Hughes was drawn to jazz music. This part is the analysis of the sociopolitical and cultural situation of the Harlem Renaissance. Here began the debate on how African Americans should represent themselves in art, and it was the time when Hughes began writing jazz poetry proclaiming that the use of jazz was a major part of his artistic vision to portray lower-class African Americans, their sorrows and joys and to waken their racial self-conciousness and self-assertiveness. Further, the first part includes an in-depth analysis of jazz music and it’s genres: from work songs, spirituals, blues to swing and bebop. This analysis, based essentially on the works of the musicologist Marshal W. Stearns, is complemented with examples from Hughes’ poems. This approach of studying music, history and poetry led to the second part of the paper and the analysis of particular poems, mainly from “The Weary Blues” (with influences of blues and swing) and “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (influences of later jazz: bebop, boogie-woogie) which are considered to be the most musical works by Hughes. The structural analysis of the poetic narrative revealed how jazz music can be integrated into and influence a poem by: 1) Using jazz improvisation devices: (scat singing, shouts, moans, irregular break between the lines (pauses), breaks and distortions; 2) Repeating jazz song structures: choruses, riffs, call-and-response patterns; 3) Using jazz techniques: sincopation, repeated structure, imagery, multivoicedness; 4) Using jazz idioms: expressive, colloquial language, blues phrases, boogie-woogie themes. Hughes has never studied jazz formally and was not the first one to write about jazz technically, but he had a deep understanding of the music and was the first one to fully embody a jazz aesthetic, to transform the idioms of blues and jazz into poetic verse. To this day he is considered to be one of the most innovative voices in American poetry. This paper joins the research fields of both music and poetry and there is still a lot to discover about Hughes’ works and his influences. The next step to better understand his relationship with jazz music would be analysing his poetry-to-jazz readings where he reads his poems to the accompaniment of live music by musicians like Leonard Feather and Charles Mingus and creates a dialogue between the two as Hughes always said that “the rhythm of life is jazz rhythm”. |
