What Is Expressive Theory?

Abstract

Expressive theory has been sketched in sections 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 of chapter 4 dealing with (oni)ontology of performance. We have seen that expression splits into semantics and rhetorics: What is expressed, and how this is performed. Performance theory as it stands now partitions this complex of expressivity into three big themes: emotion, gesture, and analysis. These refer not to the rhetoric aspect, but to the variety of contents that are transferred to the audience, i.e. to the two axes of realities and embodiments on which these contents are distributed.

This last album is not titled as a memorial album or as an album in tribute because it was titled by Coltrane himself the Friday before his death on Monday, July 17, 1967. He and Bob Thiele were considering words that might apply to the sense of this album, and finally Coltrane said, “Expression. That’s what it is.”

Nat Hentoff [51]