Milan Kundera vs. Yale School of Music

Recently, Yale music dean Robert Blocker was quoted in The New York Times dismissing jazz as something apart from the Western canon. “Our mission is real clear,” Robert Blocker said about the Yale School of Music, which does little to promote jazz. “We train people in the Western canon and in new music.” Somehow, Blocker mislaid his notes and forgot that jazz was the important music of the 2oth century. Surprisingly, Czech novelist Milan Kundera had a better handle on the tradition of Western music. A passage from his 1967 novel, The Joke, from the character Jaroslav:

“I was reviewing the evolution of European music from the Baroque on. After the Impressionist era it has grown weary of itself. It had exhausted almost all of its sap in its sonatas and symphonies as well as in its clichéd tunes. That was why jazz had had such a miraculous effect on it. Above thousand-year-old roots, fresh sap now began to rise. Jazz captured more than European nightclubs and dance halls. It captured Stravinsky, Honegger, and Milhaud, who opened their compositions to its rhythms.”