In trying to figure out a dissertation topic, I’ve been struck by the different time frames that art movements (music, visual, film) have embraced abstraction. Moving from New Orleans jazz to art from the continent and back to Bob Dylan seems like a huge undertaking. It is. But I think most of it makes sense.

What reason NOLA musicians had for evolving the music? The answer has something to do with advancing the craft, which might make folk musics a hard fit for this topic. Louis Armstrong played and sang differently than anyone else, used show tunes and wound up being the best known player out of his scene prior to moving to Chicago. Advancement for the sake of advancement might be a vacuous way to put it – but testing what a form is capacious of doing is as important as whatever further innovations arise. With Armstrong, there was a commercial aspect as well. After marrying Lil Hardin, a pianist he performed with, she pushed him to lead bands and tour more extensively. That wouldn’t have been possible if he’d maintained the sound he left NOLA with.

But it’s worth wondering why comparing music from the States to visual art from Europe. Regardless of where an event occurs, there can be antecedents anywhere, or similar movements beginning in drastically different places. Futurism possessed the same sort of confrontational attitude towards its audience British punk bands aped sixty years later. And even in the development of punk, scenes independent of each other sprung up all over the world within less than a decade. Maybe the Buzzcocks heard the Germs. But maybe not.

There is unquestionably a social science aspect to all of this requiring examination of outside factors which resulted in these various innovations, but that can also serve to connect two seemingly disparate movements or events.

As for there not being a standard levied across discipline, I think that’s where looking at the forms each artist or musician was working with and what was eventually abstracted becomes the guide. Dylan turning folk music into rock/art or Picasso turning painting into protest/art functions in that manner. Each came out of a tradition and because of surrounding social conditions saw fit to use their medium in ways that didn’t necessarily find immediate acceptance because of its deviation from accepted forms.

All of this sounds grossly obtuse. And it is. But there’ a through-line, which might have more to do with the place and time each of these innovations occurred than with the idea of abstraction. We’ll see, though.