If I were to think out loud as a composer I have to apologize for the length of the tome but this is what I think about;

One way to structure knowledge is historically. One way to look at jazz is as a historical development from ii V Is, to substitutions for ii V Is, to the neo-romanticism of Chick Corea, to the nod to Modernism of Alan Holdsworth.

I like what Kyle Gann said about classical modernism, is that our experience in America after James Brown, Charles Ives and Rock guitar has nothing to do with the angst of the Viennese school as expressed in classical modernism by Schoenberg, Messiaen etc... Although that’s a natural expression of Europeans living in Europe after world war two, for Americans it’s just modernist baggage. He didn’t say that exactly, he said something to the effect that to pretend we’re Europeans of the latter Vienese school is a musical lie for those from elsewhere.

However, Holdsworth came up with his esoteric modal practice because he was an Englander living in England and inheritor of the modernist compositional techniques extant in his day. After the complete breakdown of tonality and later the invention of the twelve tone technique, Europeans swung back toward tonality in reaction against serialism by way of Debussy but in the altered form of unusual modes/extended scales as is Messiaens practice. That was Holdsworths natural inheritance as a European and is also our natural inheritance as world citizens. We don’t need to think in terms of nationalist boundaries.

I’m always looking for a new direction and can see that in the history of music in general (instead of the history of just jazz or classical) after total serialism, where even the dynamics, time signatures, accents, starting positions, intervals, instrumentation etc.. were put in rows, came Minimalism as a reaction to a structure which listeners couldn’t hear. It’s not obvious that the rhythms of total serialism have a relationship to the pitches, dynamics and signatures.

Messiaen used rows but didn’t apply them to pitches as had already been done with 12-tone music. Anyway, those on the forum who say there are much simpler ways to create a solo than what I’m doing are definitely right of course. Minimalism was a reaction to techniques of Total serialism which get lost on the listeners who can’t hear the relationships between elements of the music. Only analysts who look at the score can discover them.

Continuing to move historically, after Minimalism came Post-minimalism and Totalism not to be confused with Total Serialism and this is kind of where we’re at now as far as linear historical development. Totalist music uses unusual scales which are tonal but usually non-functional, sustained dissonances, polyrhythms, repeating unequal phrase lengths etc..and I’ve tried a few things like that but more as avant-garde Japanese compositions with Shakuhachi bamboo flute, sho bamboo mouth organ, Korean hourglass changu drum kind of stuff.

I’m always experimenting and not many people ever hear all the failed experiments that go into finding something cool. I’ve studied Balinese and Javanese gamelan, Indian Gats, Japanese Gagaku, Korean rhythmic concepts, Middle Eastern tunings and rhythms, Thai music, classical preludes, counterpoint, fugues etc… always looking for something useful to this contemporary situation.

I already posted up a gamelan piece. I’ve got a real nice piece for Bansuri and tabla based on the Indian compositional practice of Gat that’s up on Soundclick but most of the Messiaenic, Bartokish, John Adamsish stuff that I try out doesn’t really fly most of the time as fusion.

Messiaen has this technique of augmentation of a melody’s rhythm where he adds half of a rhythmic event’s value to it the next time it plays. It’s his singular innovation in the history of music. The effect is more noticeable in a classical/orchestral/sonata form context but gets lost when trying to apply it to fusion at least the way I’ve been trying to do it.

Bartok’s bimodality is prolonged and the texture isn’t thick enough for what I’m looking for. John Adams phasing fugues work as classical music but don’t work as jazz in my opinion but it might be possible to incorporate some rhythmic phasing and you’ll probably hear that in some of my next pieces as I try it out to hear if it works.

I thought I’d share with everyone on the boards my process as a composer so here are two mandalas for the serialization of musical elements.

I tried to be as complete as possible. I left out the serialization of instruments in the drum kit which could be used melodically. Perhaps from lowest to highest; Bass Drum, Low Tom, Middle Tom I, Middle Tom II, High Tom, Snare, Side Stick, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Crash Cymbal I, Crash Cymbal II, Splash Cymbal. Each of the 12 elements of the drum kit corresponding to a chromatic pitch C, C#, D etc…

The other idea I have is to turn the drum notation vertically and read it/play it on a melodic instrument such as keyboards to create moveable ostinati so there’s this unconscious perception that there might be a relationship of the ostinato with the drum kit’s rhythm.

The third document which is not a large mandala shows a person’s name with the vowels left out (CHPTDW) around a circle with 12 positions, the alphabet written around it clockwise from the top, and lines connecting the consonants in the person’s name in order. On the right page in the upper 75% are the musical associations to each letter CHPTDW.

On the left page are some of the associations for each element in the order created by the order of the letters in the person’s name. It’s not completed in the photo but I’ve completed it in my notebook as of now.

Next up is hopefully to find some relationships which are NOT lost on the listener or at least sound cool.

I’ll post it up when I’m finished and presumably it will be a bit of a departure from my normal fare.

http://s253.beta.photobucket.com/user/g ... ort=6&o=18

http://s253.beta.photobucket.com/user/g ... ort=6&o=19

http://s253.beta.photobucket.com/user/g ... ort=6&o=17

You can find the download for these under the options button on Photobucket if you'd like to examine them more closely.

Dude you're scaring the fuck out of me......I am a simple Canadian igloo troll, not wise to the ways of theory, musicspeak, chords, notes, and general heady PHD shit I can't undertand. I can ride a snowmobile though and like to drink rum and egg nog. Beat that......

I have to ask......what do you do for a living?

Did you get your stick(s) yet?


kev

I can't beat riding a snowmobile drunk on egg nog. Yum. As for my work, I run a small farm/ranch in Indonesia. No stick yet. I was going to construct an instrument that couldn't really be confused with a proper stick but the pickups have not arrived.

btw My charts have some small relationship to Emmett's offset modal system in that he goes through his scales in a SERIES and this is an excellent practice for composers as a place to look for new ideas.

This stuff is very informative.
Recently, I have wanted to move away from writing "pop" "songs", if you know what I mean. Not anything wrong with them. I am just not sure rock, prog, blues, or jazz music are my "heart" music. I am yearning to create something different for my self. I am bored or frustrated or just tired of intro:verse:chorus:verse:chorus:solo:chorus:conclusion type of compostions that I have grown up with in America. I suppose the thread about Trey Gunn's original voice has inspired me to try to look inward a bit deeper to discover what, if any, my original voice might be.

I could make this a new topic, but I wanted to see if you had any ideas on where to start( education-wise, are there certain Composition Theory books that are superior to others, that sort of thing). I have a teacher here that will teach me these things, but he is busy touring with a musical act right now. I am sort of looking to get a head start on it. Especially since I have an Oud( a new instrument for me) on the way in a few weeks.

Anyway, just thought I would pick your twisted brain a bit.

Mike

You don't need to buy theory books. Everything you might want to know is on that great Encyclopedic database in the sky called the internet. What I've been doing lately is searches for 20th Century music techniques and composers. Then doing searches for those composers' names with the word "article" in the search field.

Although you can listen to recordings also, I find descriptions of musical processes to be the most helpful for me and scores if you can get them which are most easily got at a library. I like the fact I can't completely understand the music from a description in an article and so when I try to create original music as it was described to me, when I compare it to the actual music of the artist being described, it doesn't sound like I've copied them.

If I had listened to their music first, I'd be tainted and would be struggling to avoid sounding like them while simultaneously trying to copy them. For example, I read an article about how Shorter's improvisational lines are put together but since I'm actually trying to sound like Holdsworth in the end I don't really sound like either of them. I sound like me. I never listen to Shorter and I haven't listened to Holdsworth in a long time.

Libraries are another great source for finding gems. The Northern Arizona University Cline Library (where I used to work) has some very interesting books on 20th Century music.

Another idea is to study all kinds of things like baby vocalizations, animal music, patterns in nature, primal speech, fractals, the relationship of mathematics to music, art and architecture. The relationship of art to music. Books on aesthetics and postmodern philosophy.

I like Karatani. He has this idea about how to resolve the apparent dichotomies of the post-postmodern world using a technique that already exists in art. He refers to a style of painting where one end of the street and the other end of the street are presented on a single canvas essentially uniting a seeming paradox. The technique is called Parallax.

Artists have taken from his lead and used it to solve real world problems like environmental pollution. There's this river in Checkoslovakia and a factory there polluting it. Fish were dying and people couldn't use the river. The artist put an installation where ordinary people and politicians etc... go to view the site. The artist had interviewed the polluters, the environmentalists, the politicians, the locals, the investors and played back their interviews all simultaneously on site from several monitors so people who went there could see all the viewpoints at once.

The result was that the politicians together with the polluters channeled the pollution to only one side of the river helping to save the fish, and save some of the river for everyone else. This takes art out of it's role as ineffectual and frequently incomprehensible abstract social commentary and gives it the power to make real change in the world.

Evan Ziporyn is doing something similar but takes two styles such as Balinese Gamelan and Western music and combining them in a way that you can't say it's Gamelan with Western influences or it's Western music using some gamelan. His music is so hybrid that it can't be resituated back into what went into creating it. It's a completely new thing.

Also, a study of compositional methods employed in the avant-garde and Japanese music as well as other world musics is likely to be fruitful.

Just wanted to let you know though, my fusion music is often constructed Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Verse, Verse, Chorus, Out... if we're talking about form.

Some serialists after thinking about the problem of form have said that having a single form such as the sonata (which most of the other classical forms are based on) is not representative of our contemporary needs as composers and listeners because it doesn't have enough sections. They're probably thinking something like it should have 7 sections if using a seven note scale and 12 sections if using 12-tone rows or other related concept.

If you have a song in C major, for example, the third section would correspond to the pitch E and since it's only a half step from E to F, they might make that third section half as short as the previous sections to reflect the same ratios that exist in the scale. Although it doesn't always have to be applied this way, the idea of corresponding ratios is an important concept gaining currency in the discussion of forms and other facets of music.

Although the current trend in 20th century classical music is to have only one section which uses a ramp scheme for development as opposed to an arch. The music, if it could be said to have two sections, slowly morphs into the other state and then ends... making most of the pieces relatively short.

The sonata form was designed for tonal music so it and the pop song format are fine for tonal music I feel, although there is a much wider palette we could be drawing from. It's only atonal music which shouldn't try to be forced inside of it since there's no way to modulate to the dominant for the second theme because there isn't a dominant. And then there's the issue of music that doesn't have ANY themes but is all orchestral texture and color.

Others have said that atonal music has a different dominant. It's the chromatic mediant a major third above the 'tonic'. The subdominant is the chromatic mediant a major third below.

The Totalists (not the total serialists) have the idea that since melodies have traditionally mostly moved by step, the interval of a second is the strcturing device for melody. They decided that they wanted to use the same structuring device for rhythm that is applied to melody so they use the ratio 9:8 a lot like alternating between 9/8 and 8/8 or visa versa and a polyrhythm of the two.

I noticed you like Chick Corea. There are some fantastic articles (more than 5) on the net about his approach to improvisation and harmonic devices and what not.

I think the articles that I posted in the Music and Meaning thread help decide which of the thousands of ideas are going to be right for us as individuals.

Thanks, Tatsu. I have been so busy that I havent had time to check out your charts or look up any articles you suggest. It is high on my priority list for things to do once the hustle and bustle of the holiday. I enjoyed the bit about deciding how many parts a song has by the number of tones in the scale being used. I find myself using 7 tone scales alot. I guess many of the 5 tones scales leave out the chromatic movement my ear desires. But I suppose I need to force myself to use other scales intentionally to stretch myself. So far, though I enjoy hearing other people play the "bebop" scales, I don't enjoy listening to myself play them. I think because I haven't mastered progressions that use them. The fake books help, but sometimes the chords seem arbitrarily thrown in by the song writer. At least to my current knowledge of theory.

Thanks again for your sharing your thoughts on music theory, composition and other aspects. I enjoy reading your posts, though I am far from comprehending it all.

Mike

Debussy based some of his chord root movement on pentatonic relationships so don't disregard the pentatonic just yet. That was one of the other forms that I didn't mention last time: Forms built with 5 sections whose lengths are based on the size of the steps between the pitches of various pentatonic possibilities.

Yeah, the fake books can help a lot. I really liked that deceptive Neapolitan cadence in the Shorter tune. The more I think about it the more I feel it's slick as snot. I never saw anything like it in analysis of Corea's music. Also, reading analysis especially of Chick Corea's music is what allowed me to know how a lot of these postmodern chord progressions operate.

Maybe chords sound arbitrarily thrown in to you because you have to make the tritones in the chords resolve the right way or avoid normal voicings so the chords don't have the tritones in them possibly.

Another thing to think about is those Middle Eastern scales and tunings say with CDbEFGAbBb with something half flat or three quarters flat would make for a form with an odd length in one of the sections.

I forget which note is SUPPOSED to be flatted slightly but my earl likes both the Db to be more flat and also the Bb.

Another form expanding/destroying current simultaneous with developments in Late 20th Century music not to be neglected (I almost did) is Free Jazz. They have several unique ways to structure and develop a piece of music. I've got details on this stuff we've been talking about so if you want me to pick just one and say more, we can...serialism, postminimalism, totalism or Free Jazz.

Chord root movement based on pentatonic relationships. See, there is just the kind of thing that makes me see how little I think about composition. I usually think of chords helping to decide which scale to use in the melody. It seems obvious now that it can work the other way too. I know I have written music this way unintentionally before. Now I have a desire to focus on doing this intentionally(almost exclusively) for a while.

That being said, I would like to hear you say more on Free Jazz. I have always enjoyed listening to people doing this type of music, and attempting it myself. There seems to be a line between Free Jazz and avante garde, probably the stress on form. Here is where one crosses the line between entertainer and artist, I think. Keeping in mind that taste enters in heavy here as to what is successfull and what is not.