[Peter Pallotta]

Why has golf course architecture had so few striking transitions / markedly different eras?

Jazz was born in America at about the same time that golf was (say, roughly around 1900), and since then it's had original/New Orleans Jazz, then Armstrong, then Big Bands and Swing, then Bop, then Cool/west coast jazz  (and at about the same time, Latin/Cuban jazz), then hard Bop, then Free/modal jazz, then jazz-rock fusion etc. 

I'm probably simplifying too much, missing things and getting some of it flat-out wrong; but my point is that there has been constant change/transition in jazz, and of a kind that means that no one confuses Bop with Dixieland, for example, or hard Bop with Cool jazz.

Meanwhile, in golf course architecture, there seems to have been only the "Golden Age" and then everything else, with maybe Robert Trent Jones thrown into the mix. 

And while for good or ill the transition periods in jazz came with some big and often acrimonious debates amongst the proponents of the various schools, the only fundamental and acrimonious debate about golf course architecture I know of is the Crane-Behr debate.

Does that get it pretty much right? If so, what explains that? Why has one century-old form of art and entertainment had so many transitions while another century-old form or art and entertainment had so few?

Is there just that much less to 'debate' about golf course architecture? Are its principles so basically fixed that it can't change often or quickly or dramatically? 

(And I think it's worth noting that for a big chunk of its history, jazz was music that also served the dancers who danced to it, just like golf architecture is an art that also serves the golfers who golf on it)

Thoughts? Groundless speculations?

Peter

[Mike Nuzzo]

I don't like a comparrison between jazz and golf architecture:
There are way more jazz musicians - more artists striving to create something unique.
A single musician can create hundreds of compositions creating their own distinct evolution that over time can be vast - while an architect creates only a handful on their own.
There are rules to golf - none as far as I know to Jazz.

[Tommy Williamsen]

I actually find the comparison between jazz and golf interesting. The piano styling differences between James Johnson and Thelonius Monk are as different and interesting as architectural differences between Seth Raynor and Desmond Muirhead. 

Jazz, however, has spawned more variation in style than golf.  Jazz originally grew differently in different parts of the country.  New Orleans Jazz was completely different than Chicago Jazz.  Old CB designed in both New York and Illinois.  A great many Jazz musicians for the most part could care less what others think of their work.  That can't be said as much for architects.  They have to design for a market.  A jazz musician, and my brother-in-law is one, plays for himself.  When there is that  kind of freedom you get more variation in style and more imagination can be expressed.  Thelonius Monk is still great.  Desmond Muirhead, well look at Stone Harbor.,

[Jim Nugent]

First thought, it has to do with access.  East, instant, almost total access to music, but severe lack of access to gca:

1.  Almost anyone can pick up an instrument and learn to play it.  Certainly tens of millions (maybe even billions) have done so, from every walk of life.  Only a tiny, elite few have ever designed golf courses. 

2.  You can write and play music in minutes or even seconds.  As a result, generations in music can flash by real fast.  Designing and building a golf course, a decent one anyway, takes months, years or sometimes decades. 

3.  You need no one's permission to write music.  Few or no permissions to perform it.  To build golf courses you need tons of permissions.  This again limits the outcomes. 

4.  You get almost instant feedback from your ideas in music.  In gca you might have to wait years or more. 

5.  Land imposes severe limits on gca.  Nothing of the sort in music. 

6.  Jazz musicians can hold jam sessions, where they exchange musical ideas on the spot, and hear the outcomes. 

gca is vastly more limited, in terms of who does it, how long it takes to do it, the places it can be done.  Music gets the constant, ongoing feedback of billions of people, in performance, writing and listening.   

[Jason McNamara]

When there is that  kind of freedom you get more variation in style and more imagination can be expressed.  Thelonius Monk is still great.  Desmond Muirhead, well look at Stone Harbor.,

OK, but isn't Desmond Muirhead closer to Ornette Coleman?

[JESII]

Jazz was born in America at about the same time that golf was (say, roughly around 1900), and since then it's had original/New Orleans Jazz, then Armstrong, then Big Bands and Swing, then Bop, then Cool/west coast jazz  (and at about the same time, Latin/Cuban jazz), then hard Bop, then Free/modal jazz, then jazz-rock fusion etc. 

I am not very knowledgeable in Jazz so this is a serious question...is that it? the eras you've listed above, is that it? If so, I would argue that your premise is off...and maybe in an interesting way.

I would say that "the Golden Age of Golf Design" might have illustrated this the best, but in that "Golden Age" I think we had many different "Eras" all playing themselves out at a very similar time. I think some of those exclusionary points Jim Nugent made had an influence, but just the same how different was George Thomas from CBM? I think because of the difficulties involved in actually creating a golf course you have to give more weight to the people and styles that were (and have been) able to do so.

Wouldn't you say there are two or three (at a minimum) distinct styles of golf course architecture in operation today?

[TEPaul]

I'd say golf architecture has had all kinds of style changes over its approximately 150 year history. Whether those style changes constituted "eras" may be debatable but there are probably a good half dozen to a dozen different "eras" in the evolution of the art of golf course architecture, at least in my opinion.

Nevertheless, it's probably just hard to compare and art form like music (jazz) and and art form like golf architecture because of the vastly different purposes they serve not to mention their vastly different "mediums"---eg earth in golf architecture and the range of musical notes and arrangements in music (jazz), plus the obvious different that golf serves an interactive game and music doesn't.

[BCrosby]

A couple thoughts.

The term "era" is a bit misleading. For example, during the Golden Age there were all kinds of disagreements about almost everything. Golf designs within an era could also vary pretty wildly. So the term needs to be used carefully because it can suggest more homogeneity that was really the case.

Nonetheless it does make sense to talk about eras. It makes sense to see periods were different design ideas predominated and others were absent. Even though you can always come up with outlier courses that contradict any given definition.

But the other side of this is that the way people talked about design concepts often tended to be more extreme than the design product they actually put in the ground.

Different styles do predominate in different eras, but it's often easier to distinguish eras based on what architects said they are doing rather than by what they in fact did in the field.

Bob     

[JESII]

...but it's often easier to distinguish eras based on what architects said they are doing rather than by what they in fact did in the field.
     

Really?

What difference does it make what a guy said if he did something different?

Does the architects philosophy change your view of the finished product?

How does that compare to the guys in the field today?

[BCrosby]

Yes, really.

Take RTJ as an example. He promoted as a new idea the notion of "heroic" holes. He distinguished them from old fashioned "strategic" holes. He got a lot of work based on what he advertised as a big, new, break-through idea.

I have a lot of trouble distinguishing RTJ's examples of heroic holes and any number of well designed strategic holes from the GA.

Nonetheless we distinguish those eras - at least in part - based on what RTJ said he was doing, even though the actual product in the ground was often not that different.

Bob   

[JESII]

But then Bob, he doesn't get an era...I think what's actually on the ground is all that should matter and if, in your opinion, his stuff was not markedly different from the guys before and was not unique in its own right then it doesn't much matter what he said he was doing, does it?

[BCrosby]

Of course it matters what RTJ said he was doing. What he said is part of how we define the "Modern" era. (a/k/a the Dark Ages.)

Whether you or I think that is the wrong way to distinguish eras is unfortunately irrelevant. Rightly or wrongly eras get their tags in large part based on what architects say they were trying to do.

As an empitical matter architiects might be doing things that are not what they say they are doing. But that fact seems to be of only marginal significance when names get attached to eras.

Bob

[JESII]

You say that as though the RTJ era is set in stone...I am not necessarily suggesting you or anyone else sit down and lay out the different eras of golf course architecture (in America alone, or around the world) but if someone did, why would they pay more attention to what RTJ said in interviews than what he put in the ground?

[Tom_Doak]

It's a poor comparison because golf architecture has much more to do with money.

If golf architecture consisted of sculpting proposed courses in clay, there would be a great variety of designs.  But since they cost a few million dollars apiece to build, owners and architects both are afraid to go too far out on a limb.  We might "riff" a wild green, but a radically different golf course is less likely to happen.

Still, there have been a great variety of styles over the years -- Macdonald to MacKenzie to Jones to Dye to Fazio, many of them imitated by other contemporaries.  If you called each of those styles a genre, then golf architecture does have a fair amount of variety to it.

[JESII]

At what level of financial committment to the piece does music match golf?

Is it fair to say that happens when a producer takes on a musician in hopes of creating a song or album that might sell?

I keep thinking of the scene in "Walk the Line" when Johnny Cash gets his audition with Sam Philips and a minute into their first song Philips cuts them off and says he can't sell gospel...

Certainly, when the guys on here post their own noodling drawings get shot down, that's an effort and certainly comparable to the gospel version of Johnny Cash...

Tom Doak's courses today are on a scale similar to Jay-Z...not much risk thanks to the reputation of the name...

[Peter Pallotta]

Thanks, gents.

I knew it was a weak comparison going in, and I made more of the jazz analogy than I intended.  But I'm not sure it's a worthless comparison, or that the basic premise is as dumb as it sounds.   

Bob C makes the interesting and relevant point - i.e. that we distinguish eras in gca as much as by what architects said they were doing as what they actually put in the ground.

In jazz, no one needs to read anything from anyone to hear the difference between eras/styles.   

Even the most casual jazz fan can immediately tell the difference between swing and bop. And that's not an accident - the early bop players consciously turned swing upside down.

And most early bop musicians had far more in common with eachother -- despite a wide range of talents and individual characteristics -- than they did with musicians from another era.

I'm not sure that either of these things is true for golf course architecture and its architects -- and it sounds that the reasons for this are obvious to everyone, including the reasons you've all listed in this thread. Maybe it is all about the money.   

But still I wonder: once links golf came inland/parkland, what am I really looking at in terms of different eras (or even styles, in any meaningful sense)? 

Am I looking at differences in bunker shapes and sizes, and preferred types of green complexes,  and the marginally different sense of how to use rough?

It just struck me last night that, relative to another art form in particular , the variations in styles/eras in golf course architecture are quite narrow and few between.  That idea could be flat out wrong, and it could even be really dumb -- but since this is a discussion board I wasn't too worried about throwing it out there for discussion.

I'm not convinced though that for 100 years there have been architects secretly wishing and dreaming about radically new ways of conceiving of and building golf courses and feverishly recreating these new ideas in clay models, only to have them ALL shrink away from their dreams and ideas because it costs to much to fail.

Peter

JES - I think the jazz categories I mentioned do capture most of the mainstream  styles/transitions; but within those categories there was a wide range of latitude for personal expression, and I think that's more akin to what you're saying about Golden Age architects.

[TEPaul]

Peter:

You know your post here has really made me think of something perhaps pretty interesting and something of a revelation for me.

I'm talking about aesthetics in golf architecture compared  to perhaps aesthetics in music.

How would you describe aesthetics in jazz or music?

I've been using the word and concept of aesthetics so long just pertaining to golf architecture it has basically become something just visual to me but obviously I've always known it is of course also an appreciation of beauty to all the senses, I suppose.

There certainly isn't any visual aesthetics in jazz or music, is there? But then again, there isn't a lot of  audial aesthetics in golf architecture, is there? 

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom

I don't know if you're just having a little fun there at my expense (or at least at this topic's expense). Goodness knows you'd have reason to. But:

The 'aesthetics' of jazz music (the music I know best) seem very rich and multifaceted to me, and have to others. 

That's why Paul Desmond's sax sounded like "a dry martini"; and why Benny Goodman's clarinet was 'ivory toned"; and why to one listener Bix Beiderbecke's trumpet sounded like "a pretty girl saying 'yes'".

I think it's the same for golf course architecture. We had a thread recently about an architect's voice, and the 'sound' a golf course makes -- and there was some very 'poetic' posts that nonetheless rang very true to me. You ever get the feeling that a course is speaking in its 'true voice', or that others hit a 'false note'.

But anyway, I think you're selling yourself short; I'm almost sure that you'd be one of the last people to fall into the trap of limiting the 'golfing aesthetic' simply to the visuals....which is what I think we all tend to do when talking about golfing 'eras'.

Peter   

[mike_beene]

Is no one going to mention the Utah Jazz? Kalen? I am sure Joe is not online or he would already have mentioned this.

[TEPaul]

So what if the message body was left empty?

[Joe Hancock]

Is no one going to mention the Utah Jazz? Kalen? I am sure Joe is not online or he would already have mentioned this.

That's corny....I'd never go that route.....

Of course, we could revisit the album "Jazz" by Queen.....you know, the whole "Fat Bottom Girls" thing all over again!.....

Or, was it "Flat Bottom Bunkers"?

Joe, the non-philosopher

[Joe Hancock]

So what if the message body was left empty?

Tom Paul, that was the mother of all edits! What the hell was wrong with the 843 words you had on that post just a minute ago?

 

EDIT: Never mind, I found all of the 843 words on another thread now......

[TEPaul]

"Tom Paul, that was the mother of all edits! What the hell was wrong with the 843 words you had on that post just a minute ago?"


Ahhh, Jeeesus Christ, Joe, don't get me started.

This has been one aweful day! It all started at 5:30am when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep so I walked over here to the barn/office in the rain with a February temperature I  thought was like a damp day in June. All the fire alarms were going off in the office and in the barn but there sure wasn't any fire. I suspected it was one of those Goddamned battery alarm units in the stalls so I go down there in the dark, get a chair to stand on to replace the battery and I forgot to shut the barn door so one of the horses that's a Belgian and weighs about 95 thousand pounds wanders into the barn and knocks me off the chair I'm standing on.

That was just the beginning. Everything else I touched for the next five hours either didn't work or I broke. And tonight Peter told me I posted a post on the wrong thread so I tried to delete it and I couldn't find the delete button so I highlighted the words and deleted them and wrote something about thanks for telling me the message couldn't be, whatever. I think I still have ten fingers but it seems like in the last week they've all turned into thumbs.

But thanks for asking anyway! 

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