Originally Posted by
christianm77
Yeah, ATTYA is OK. It's better in 3, because there the rhythmic predictability of the melody is less pronounced. Not my favourite standard from a melodic standpoint although jazz musicians like the harmony. Probably not my favourite Kern.
You know they say familiarity breeds contempt... And while any halfway competent jazz amateur can play ATTYA after a fashion, obviously there's some difference between someone who can do it really fucking well (let alone Parker or someone) and someone who has recently learned the 'right' scales from an Aebersold...
Of course, the fact is that distinction may be completely lost an audience... (I remember that episode of Friends with Ross's music) but actually I don't think it is. People can tell the difference between something rhythmically engaged and something meandering, for one.
(Now, go back in time and you'll find basic repeating forms such as Chaconnes that formed the basis of many simpler pieces in the baroque era. Or in the case of Bach, an honest to god masterpiece.)
But yeah, classical music is obviously good, attracting funding from corporate sources and wealthy patrons for instance... Contemporary concert music, not so much because it sounds very different and hasn't become part of the cultural furniture. Tends to more subsidised by the state...
The fact that you mention Sonata form suggests you are not massively familiar with trends in New Music - and you yourself are obviously an interested party, a musician? So there you go...
Yeah, I hear you.
Division of labour, specialisation of tasks, strict hierarchy allow certain things to be achieved that could not happen with a looser organisation, Mahler symphonies, Wagner operas and so on....
(We could of course compare to the industrial revolution, which is when these changes happened in music... The orchestra to some extent models the social structures of the time.)
It's interesting hearing you say this stuff after a weekend of hearing classical music educators complain about how students are taught to always revere the composer, never write or improvise their own music, never develop strong aural skills and essentially train only to interpret the notes on the page...
And did you know job satisfaction for orchestral professionals is on a par with refuse collectors?
OTOH today's musicians are increasingly very versatile freelancers. They can play pretty much anything.
It's also worth pointing out that many of the composers the lay audience may have heard of - Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert etc - were also performers, and many improvisers. Their artistic world did not much resemble that of the present day, which is largely inherited from the 19th century. The division of labour of this kind is more 19th century than it is 17th or 18th. Orchestras were also smaller, the conductor did not exist as a specialised role, and so on...
But I think bottom line if you are saying - jazz musicians are not trained to be good composers, why would we expect them to be so, I would agree. There are fantastic composers in jazz of course - ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Maria Schneider... but to expect all jazz improvisors to be good composers of original material is silly... You have to respect the craft of composition and shed the fuck out of it to be good at it.
But I would also say, the notion that a performer can not also be a strong composer and they have to be two separate things is obviously untrue, and I feel I've shown that here.
Warm Up exercises
Today, 07:53 AM in Guitar Technique