From the earliest beginnings of jazz, classical music has played a role in its development. Early and pre-jazz musicians were known to have performed classical music publicly, and others, such as Scott Joplin, studied with European teachers. As jazz moved into the twentieth century, the borrowing of classical music instrumentation became prominent. In the 1950s, jazz musicians employed fugal writing, as exemplified by Dave Brubeck's Fugue on Bop Themes, among other works. In the 1960s, twelve-tone rows were utilized, as exemplified by Bill Evans's T.T.T. Also, the procedure known as "jazzin' the classics" has been a constant feature within jazz tradition, from Jelly Roll Morton's recording of a version of the Misere from Il Trovatore through Joe Walsh's synthesized arrangement of Ravel's Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty. An appendix includes selective annotated discography.

Works: Brubeck: Fugue on Bop Themes (22); Lewis: Vendome (23), Three Windows (23), Concorde (23), Versailles (23); Hampton: Fugue (23); Williams: Prelude and Fugue (23); Ferguson: Passacaglia and Fugue (23); Johnson: Music for Brass (23); Schuller: Abstraction (23); Bank: Equation Part I (23); De Franco: 12-Tone Blues (23); Giuffre: Densities I (23); Farberman: . . . Then Silence (23); Smith: Elegy for Eric (23); Schifrin: The Ritual of Sound (23); Coltrane: Miles Mode (24); Evans: T.T.T. (24-25); Heckman: The Twelves (26); Waller: Russian Fantasy (26); Morton/Verdi: Misere (26-27); Gershwin: The Man I Love as performed by Paul Whiteman (27); Ellington: Ebony Rhapsody (27); Walsh/Ravel: Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty (30); Ginastera: Toccata as performed by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (30).

Sources: Liszt: Rigoletto Concert Paraphrase (26); Rossini: William Tell Overture (26); Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite (26); Rachmaninoff: Prelude in C sharp Minor (26); Verdi: Il Trovatore (26-27); Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (27); MacDowell: To a Wild Rose (27); Rimsky-Korsakov: Song of India (27); Wagner: Tristan and Isolde (27); Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (27), Passacaglia in C (27); Stravinsky: Rite of Spring (28, 30); Ginastera: Toccata (30); Ravel: Mother Goose Suite (30).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Eytan Uslan