Reply to Bradshaw, McDonagh, and Marshall: Turn Off the Bubble Machine

Abstract

In commenting on the art-versus-commerce theme, Bradshaw, McDonagh, and Marshall refer to its treatment in jazz-related films as “hackneyed” and “pedestrian.” In its place, they recommend various alternative perspectives—especially those devoted to empirical studies of everyday working musicians. But, in this, they obscure the tragic aspects of a great artist’s fall to lowly stature and remain insensitive to the blow that such a calamity strikes at the foundations of macromarketing. Here, in relation to the art-versus-commerce theme, it appears that insights from macromarketing can illuminate our understanding of a cinemusical text via the close reading of seemingly trivial but nonetheless significant textual details, as illustrated by the interpretive analysis of a single note from Duke Ellington’s score for Paris Blues (1961).