Sketch (pronounced skech)
(1) A
simply or hastily executed drawing or painting, especially a preliminary one,
giving the essential features without the details, later to be elaborated.
(2) A
rough design, plan, or draft, as of a book.
(3) A
brief or hasty outline of facts, occurrences etc.
(4) As
thumbnail sketch, a piece of text which summaries someone or something.
(5) A
short, usually descriptive, essay, history, or story.
(6) A
short play or slight dramatic performance, as one forming part of a variety or vaudeville
program; a short comedy routine (a skit).
(7) To
make a sketch.
(8) To
summarize, to set forth in a brief or general account.
(9) In
metallurgy, to mark a piece of metal for cutting.
(10) In
music, a short evocative instrumental piece, used especially with compositions for
the piano.
(11) In
the slang of the Irish criminal class, as “to keep (a) sketch), to maintain a
lookout; to be vigilant; watch for something.
(12) In
journalism, as parliamentary sketch, a newspaper article summarizing political
events which attempts to make serious points in a lest than obviously serious
manner (mostly UK).
(13) In
category theory, a formal specification of a mathematical structure or a data
type described in terms of a graph and diagrams (and cones (and cocones)) on
it. It can be implemented by means of “models” (functors) which are graph
homomorphisms from the formal specification to categories such that the
diagrams become commutative, the cones become limiting (ie products) and the
cocones become colimiting (ie sums).
1660–1670:
From the Dutch schets (noun), from
the Italian schizzo, from the Latin schedium (extemporaneous poem), noun use
of neuter of schedius (extempore; hastily
made), from the Ancient Greek σχέδιος (skhédios)
(made suddenly, off-hand, unprepared), from σχεδόν (skhedón) (near, nearby), from ἔχω (ékhō) (I hold). The German Skizze, the French esquisse
& the Spanish esquicio are also
from the Italian schizzo. Sketch, sketcher, sketchist & sketchiness are nouns, verb & adjective, sketching is a noun & verb, sketched is a verb, sketchlike, sketchy, sketchier, sketchiest & sketchable are adjectives, and sketchily & sketchingly are adverbs; the noun plural is sketches. When a sketcher (or sketchist) sketches their sketches, they appear often in a sketchbook.
Six photographs of Lindsay Lohan, rendered in software as pencil sketches.
Sketch became a verb in the 1660s in the sense of “present the essential facts of" and was derived from the earlier noun. This idea of a sketch as a “brief account” by 1789 had enlarged to a "short play or performance, usually comic", still maintaining the connection from art as something less than full-scale, the reference to comedy suggesting something slight rather than a serious work. The sketch-book was first recorded in 1820. That sense extended beyond text to art and design from 1725 when it came also to mean "draw, portray in outline and partial shading", firstly to describe simple drawings, referring later to preparatory work for more elaborate creations. The adjective sketchy is noted from 1805, describing art “having the form or character of a sketch". The colloquial sense of "unsubstantial, imperfect, flimsy" is from 1878, possibly to convey the sense of something "unfinished". Adumbrate (faint sketch, imperfect representation), actually pre-dates sketch, noted first in the 1550s. It was from the Latin adumbrationem (nominative adumbratio) (a sketch in shadow, sketch, outline). The meaning "to overshadow" is from the 1660s at which time emerged the derived forms adumbrated and adumbrating and related forms are adumbration (noun), adumbrative (adjective) and adumbratively (adverb).
Sketches by “Boz,”
Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People by Charles Dickens
(1812-1870), illustrated by George Cruikshank (1792–1878).
Charles Dickens' first book, Sketches by “Boz” was a collection of 56
short pieces, originally published in various newspapers and other periodicals
between 1833-1836. They were re-issued in a two-volume set in 1836 with a
single edition appearing in 1839.
Very different from the work with which Dickens most is associated, the
theme of 56 sketches was the people and scenes of London (the built environment
best understood also as a “character” in the narratives. Divided into four sections (Our Parish, Scenes, Characters & Tales), the first three contained
non-narrative pen-portraits while the final wholly was fictional. In Sketches by “Boz”, there are passages which constitute classic
“thumbnail sketches
” (in literature, concise, vivid descriptions (classically in a single paragraph of no more than a few sentences) that captures the fundamental essence, appearance, or personality of a character, setting or scene). The term was a borrowing from the visual arts, where a
thumbnail sketch was a quickly composed, rough drawing to map out an idea, the notion being it looked
“sketchy enough to have been drawn by the artist's thumb”. In both graphics and text, the shared definition was an entire concept rendered by the depiction of its most recognizable and striking elements with no extraneous detail.
The sketch (a short, often topical comedic performance) quickly became a staple of television variety shows and such productions have (thankfully) declined in number, the format is still used. In literary theory, there are two basic categories of sketch: (1) a short prose piece (perhaps between one to two thousand words) which tends to be of the descriptive kind once most associated with newspapers and magazines (and still often appearing in the latter). In newspapers, one notable survivor is the “parliamentary sketch” in which some (often anecdotal) “color” is added to political reporting. A feature of British political journalism since the 1700s when the reporting of the antics of politicians was more restricted (to avoid the truth being told about the lies they told, that strategy seen still in the laws of defamation in some jurisdictions), many of the early parliamentary sketches used pseudonyms for those described and the art of a fine sketch writer was providing just enough for the well-informed reader to “read between the lines”. In literary use, because of the nature of the form, stylistically some sketches could overlap with the short story and there's is little point attempting to be prescriptive about where one ends and the other begins; the classic example of a sketch was Charles Dickens's Sketches by "Boz", a series of sketches of life and manners. (2) A brief dramatic piece of the kind one might find in a revue or as a curtain raiser or as part of some other kind of theatrical entertainment, exemplars being Harold Pinter's (1930-2008) Request Stop, Last to Go & Special Offer, performed in the revue Pieces of Eight, which opened at the Apollo Theatre, London, in September 1959. For better or worse, ambitious monologists including Ruth Draper (1884-1956) and Joyce Grenville (1910-1979) extended the concept of the sketch into a particular dramatic form described as "a kind of monodrama". Nor were sketches dependent on oral delivery, the solo mime artist Marcel Marceau (1923-2007) sometimes referring to his performances as un sketch dramatique (a dramatic sketch).
Sketches
of Spain
Although
not yet regarded as the landmark in jazz it would come to be in the decades
which followed its release in 1959, even in 1960 Miles Davis’s (1926-1991) Kind of Blue had already created among some aficionados an expectation; realising it was
something special, this was what they hoped would be the definitive Davis style
and they were anxious for more. The next
release however, wasn’t indicative of what was to come, Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1960 Cat# Prestige P-7166) was
the third of four albums assembled from sessions recorded long before the Kind of Blue sessions and released to
fulfil contractual obligations to the independent label Prestige. Although some purists were pleased, after Kind of Blue, the music seemed
old-fashioned.
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, (1959, Columbia, Cat# CS 8163).
Davis had
enjoyed considerable success in the 1950s but, needing the distribution and
promotional network of a major label to reach a wider audience, he’d signed
with Colombia (CBS internationally). The
early Colombia releases had been well received but it was the sixth, Kind of Blue, which made him a star
beyond the world of jazz, the album selling in volumes unprecedented in the genre;
to date, over four million copies are said to have been shipped. Davis had been innovative before, his
performance at the 1954 Newport Jazz Festival defining what had come to be
called “hard bop” (a flavor of jazz influenced by other forms, especially rhythm
and blues) but the appeal extended little beyond already established audiences. What made Kind
of Blue so significant was that Davis effectively invented modal jazz which
shifted the technique from one where the players worked within a set chord
progression to soloists creating melodies using modes which could be deployed
alone or in multiples. Musicians explain
the significance of this as a movement to the horizontal (the
scale) rather than the traditional vertical (the chord). In the somewhat insular world of jazz, that
would anyway have been interesting but the sound captivated those beyond and was
a landmark in what would come to be known as musical fusion, the cross-fertilisation
of sound and technique. Among composers,
fusion was nothing new but Kind of Blue
realised its implications in a tight, seductive package.
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, (1959, Columbia, Cat# CS 8271).
Sketches of Spain too
was a fusion but it was different to what had come before and was no attempt to be "Kind of Blue II". For one thing, the sound was big, recorded in
the famously cavernous converted church in Manhattan which for decades was
Colombia’s recording studio. Lined with
old timber and with a ceiling which stretched 100 feet (30 m) high, technicians
called it the “temple of sound” because of the extraordinary acoustic
properties. The ensemble too was big, a
necessity because this time the fusion was with the orchestral, the long opening
track an arrangement by Davis and Gil Evans (1912-1988) of the adagio movement
of Joaquín Rodrigo’s (1901-1999) guitar concerto, Concierto de Aranjuez (1939). Such
was the extent of the fusion there were traditionalists who doubted Sketches of Spain could still be called
jazz; they saluted the virtuosity but seemed to miss the sometimes arcane
complexities in construction inaccessible except to the knowing few.
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (1970, CBS, Cat# S 66236).
The wider
world however was entranced and technical progress needs also to be noted. Colombia had recorded Davis before in the then
still novel stereo but even fans acknowledged the mono pressings remained
superior and it wasn’t until 1960, after extensive testing and the refinement of
equipment that the technique had been perfected. Sketches
of Spain was lush or austere as the moment demanded, listeners new to
stereo especially enchanted at being able to hear the sounds hanging in a
three-dimensional space, each instrument a distinct object in time and place. Nobody asked for mono after that. Influential as it was, to Davis, Sketches of Spain was just another
phase. Ten years later, noting the
increasingly sparse audiences in jazz clubs and aware a new generation had
different sensibilities, Davis would fuse with other, more recent traditions
and Bitches Brew would cast his shadow over a new decade. A footnote to the change of direction Bitches Brew flagged came with the release of material from Davis's performance at the Isle of Wight Festival (1970) which included, inter alia, a 17 minute passage substantially from the album. Noting the discursiveness, producers from Columbia contacted Davis and asked him what the piece should be titled. "Call it anything" he told them, repeating the answer he'd given to the musicians at the Festival who had asked him what he was about to play. Liking that, Colombia's literalists included the track Call it Anything when the album The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies (1971) was released.
