Absence, Communion, Anarchy : Temporal Experience and the Objects of Pittsburgh'S Erroll Garner.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This is a dissertation about Erroll Garner (1921-1977) in time. The Pittsburgh-born, African American jazz pianist was known for his sense of rhythm, the component of music that is responsible for time. The thing about time is that it moves differently for everyone in every moment. However, our objective world - the objects that surround us - can ground our subjective experiences and connect us to each other. This project focuses on four objects that were shaped by Garner: the city in which he grew up, the titles to his music compositions, his solo piano introductions in music performance, and his visual art "sketches" housed at the Erroll Garner archive at the University of Pittsburgh. It considers Garner's production or transformation of the objects to be representative of four fundamental activities expounded by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958), which are, respectively, speech/action, work, labor, and thought. Garner absorbed the object world around him and, in turn, created new objects that continue to affect us today in the way we feel through our existence. The aim of this dissertation is to suggest ways of approaching Garner's objects in time. Pittsburgh is explored as a polyrhythmic object wherein space is bracketed so that memories can move unencumbered by direction or speed; borrowing from Black Quantum Futurism, three Pittsburgh jazz elders guide the method for finding Garner in the layered present. The titles to his compositions are analyzed as metonyms, words that stand-in for Garner; Ishmael Reed's mystery novel, Mumbo Jumbo(1972), in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noticed an aesthetic play in the text, presents us with the double-time absence of language. Listening to Garner's piano introductions invites a suspended or freed sense of time, a notion embedded in the philosophies of Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, and Fumi Okiji; these sonic objects are largely responsible for the 'happiness' quality that Garner's music conjured. Finally, his "sketches" are emblematic of the continuities and discontinuities of the object world; as objects with anarchic potential, they stop us in time to reveal Garner's presence.