Jazz is a genre that spans back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the southern United States, emerging primarily in cities like New Orleans, where African musical traditions blended with European harmonic structures, blues, ragtime, and brass band music. What it carried with it from the start, however, was more than sound; it bore the full weight of the social and historical conditions that produced it: the legacy of slavery, the assertion of Black cultural identity, the negotiation of freedom and belonging in a country still reckoning with its own contradictions. From these beginnings, the music grew into something restless and ever-changing, carried forward by improvisation and a spirit of experimentation. Each generation of musicians reshaped it in their own image, combining it with other genres or adapting it to their own proclivities, allowing jazz to drift and reform across decades while still holding onto its expressive core and its deep ties to the cultural history from which it emerged.

The jazz I experienced at Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) was anchored more in sensation than in historical recollection, even as the intertwined histories of New York and the genre itself framed the atmosphere in which the music unfolded. Entering the brownstone, you ascend worn stone stairs, push through large, old wooden doors, and into a space thick with low conversation, the warm glow of dim lights, and the gentle invitation of instruments playing just up the stairs. 

Accepting the invitation, I entered onto the main floor. The room held a deep, amber-tinted warmth generated by low lighting and a faint suspended haze, lending the space the unhurried, glowing quality typical of a late-night occasion. The room was full, though it had organized itself into recognizable zones of engagement. Closest to the performers, a tight crowd of listeners leaned in with attentive participation, clapping, singing, humming, (musicking!) while toward the back, loosely gathered groups maintained conversation as the music wove itself through their exchanges, bonding the space together with a unifying sonic presence. If we think back to Aaron Copland’s three planes of music listening, the performance was completely erosive of the musical plane; no one was concerned with the technical nuance behind the experience. Instead, the room pulsed with sensory and expressive listening: bodies swayed unconsciously to the rhythm, murmurs rose and fell between phrases, and the music was received as atmosphere, as grain, as vibration moving through a crowded room.

This social configuration spoke to something specific about Alpha Delta Phi's place at Columbia. Regarded by students as among the more creatively oriented houses on campus, ADP tends to draw people who are artistically motivated and intentionally resistant to mainstream campus culture. People who would never share a social or academic context found themselves consolidated around the organizing presence of the music. Engineers spoke to swimmers who spoke to novelists, asking about the pianist who had barely looked up from the keys all night, or inviting the trumpeter back for another electric solo. The performance, in this sense, assembled a common audience out of otherwise disparate individuals.

About the performance: it was one of many that night, and was a student-led rendition of Childish Gambino’s “Redbone”, built on an insistent arrangement of drums, electric guitars, piano, flute, and a most expressive trumpet. Each instrument (expectedly) had its own unique timbre—compounded by the different performers’ playing styles, but the guitars and singer were normalized to a certain extent due to the speakers’ slightly grainy amplification. 

The performance was homophonic in nature, but what made it both captivating and texturally rich was that different musical voices would emerge as the central melody; at times it would be the singer, but then it would become the trumpet, or the drums, or the flute, but seldom the piano. What was also very interesting, and possibly more to the credit of Donald Glover than the performers, is the fact that even with a fixed meter, it felt remarkably unconfined, as though the rhythm were constantly stretching against its own boundaries. There existed no defined starts or stops in the performance and instead only fluidity: when the vocalist’s line would decrescendo, a trumpet or flute would emerge from accompaniment to assume the melodic lead; when the trumpeter would momentarily pause for breath, the crowd would fill the air with roaring applause, another musicking contribution to the collectivist production of the performance.

Equally important to the performance was the energy carried forward by the performers’ movements, which seemed to be another form of accompaniment, this time to the aforementioned sensory plane of listening.  If Johann Adolph Schiebe were to sit in on the performance, the encounter would be doubly disorienting; confronting not only a genre born nearly 150 years after his death, utterly alien to every musical convention he knew and criticized, but also a room full of bodies in open, uninhibited motion with the music. This would sit uneasily with the sensibility expressed in his letter on Johann Sebastian Bach, where he implies a kind of intellectual dignity in physical restraint, the most impressive musical performance, in his view, one where the body does not visibly yield to the music’s impulses. The swaying of the guitarists, the fervent nodding of the drummers, the trumpeter cupping a heart to her coperformers, would therefore appear to Scheibe less as musical virtue and more as a kind of excess. Yet within the logic of the performance itself, these gestures functioned as an extension of the sound, sustaining momentum in the piece, in the audience, and individually, in the performers.

What the ADP performance ultimately reveals is something larger than itself: a living index of the culture that produced it. The creation of "Redbone" was not incidental. Donald Glover wrote the song in a specific and politically charged moment, its slow-burning, psychedelic soul functioning as both seduction and warning, its lyrics saturated with the anxiety of Black love under perpetual threat. To perform it in a predominantly white, elite academic space is to quietly import all of that history into a room that might otherwise remain insulated from it. The audience absorbed the sensation without necessarily absorbing the weight, which is itself a culturally revealing act.

This is where Slavoj Zizek's reading of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" becomes useful, though not entirely convincing. Zizek argues that the hymn functions as "an empty signifier, a symbol that can stand for anything," and cites its appropriation by Nazis, Maoists, and white supremacists alike as evidence. The ideological license of the piece is historically undeniable. But the empty signifier argument, persuasive on the surface, may ultimately misidentify where meaning in music actually lives. The fact that different regimes have claimed the "Ode to Joy" does not mean the music itself is semantically vacant; it may instead mean that sufficiently powerful institutions can temporarily override a piece's inherent emotional logic through sheer contextual force, the way a word can be weaponized without ceasing to have a real meaning.

Music is not, in any straightforwardly honest sense, infinitely rewritable. Certain acoustic properties produce responses that are remarkably stable across cultures and audiences. A gradually ascending melodic line paired with a building crescendo registers as something close to universally expansive, hopeful, generative. Rapid, jaggedly dissonant oscillations in the lower registers produce unease, a darkly instinctive sense of threat. These are not arbitrary cultural assignments; they are deeply rooted responses to sound, consistent enough across vastly different listeners to suggest something more structurally embedded than ideology. "Redbone" itself depends on exactly this logic. Its descending, hypnotically repetitive bass line creates an immediately recognizable feeling of suspended unease, of beauty shadowed by something unresolved. That quality is not accidental, and it is not culturally negotiable in the way Zizek's framework implies.

What the diverse audience at ADP shared, then, was not simply a neutral symbolic surface onto which each person projected their own meaning. They shared a genuine, collectively felt acoustic experience, one with real emotional directionality. The engineers and the novelists swayed to the same insistent rhythm because the rhythm was, in a meaningfully non-arbitrary way, compelling. The social openness of the room was real, but it was produced by the music's own intrinsic qualities rather than by its supposed emptiness.

Zizek's marcia turca reading remains valuable nonetheless. The rupture he identifies in Beethoven, that carnivalesque interruption of performed unity, does illuminate something true about the ADP evening. The warmth was genuine. The briefly assembled fraternity was genuine. But "Redbone" was always already carrying its own quietly insistent, emotionally specific gravity beneath the amber light, and the room, whether it knew it or not, was feeling exactly that.

Works Cited

Žižek, Slavoj. “Ode to Joy, Followed by Chaos and Despair.” The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html

Copland, Aaron. “How We Listen to Music.” What to Listen for in Music. McGraw-Hill, 1988. SpringMuse, springmuse.hunter.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Copland-How-We-Listen-To-Music.pdf