My thoughts on jazz theory

[James W]

Ethan Iverson:

Conventional wisdom suggests that Tyner was Coltrane’s disciple. This is true, but it also true that Coltrane got a lot from Tyner. In one interview with Bob Dawbarn, Coltrane said, “Tyner plays some things on the piano, but I don’t know what they are.” For the big band album Africa/Brass, Coltrane told his arranger Eric Dolphy to get the voicings from Tyner.

Coltrane also said of Tyner: “He’s sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time”.

Thanks. He perhaps (probably?) went and discovered what they were.

[itsmyname]

humans love math, love to quantize everything, rules come after.

But it's not "universal", it's like time, humans think time is an important thing, no it's not, it hels to quantize, that' all but time is not, and time creates nothing.

Rules are like the time for us, it's here to help but it can't pretend to be.

But I can be wrong.

[Jonah]

Preface, I have taught jazz theory, improvisation and jazz guitar at the university level. I'm the author of the Sheets of Sound for Guitar series books. I'm well versed in traditional and jazz theory.
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Do you realize that theory, in particular -- western theory, is an after-the-fact analysis of composed music? We tend to think of theory as rules and formulas when it's simply a common language used to describe what someone else has done.


The common western theory taught in universities is based on the Baroque period of music (1600–1750).


And then, when jazz came along, we tried to analyze it in terms of Baroque rules and principles. Along came Bird, Trane, Herbie, Chick and up and up.


AND WE ARE STILL USING BAROQUE terminology to describe jazz. Of course, Barris Harris, Hal Galper, Dave Liebman updated these principles and helped usher in a period of what we now refer to as "Jazz Theory".


Of course, we are still taking after-the-fact analysis and attempting to generate rules and regulations about what is valid based on looking at things backwards.


Reality check -- You don't play by the rules. YOU MAKE THE RUlES. The rules will bend to follow what you played. If it sounds good, it *IS* good.


With all that being said, can you play a b9 against a Maj7 chord? Answer, YES OF COURSE YOU CAN. Try taking a tune like "You stepped out of a dream" and for ever tonic, Try using an altered dominant tonality. Does it work? Yes, does it fit the rule books? Who cares!!!


Let's stop trying to use western theory (baroque or otherwise) to govern what we can or cannot do in jazz.


Rules are like labels, jazz is not Mayonnaise.


I'll post some more articles like this in the future, perhaps taking these concepts further.

I wrote many times on this forum that classical theory describes what we hear, jazz theories mostly describe how we want to play.

But still classical theory can be very practical in that sense too.

[charlieparker]

I think people should reorient themselves away from the word theory and towards the word composition. In other words, what would they teach in a composition class, whether that is composing a Jazz head or Jazz tune or a four part chorale or rules for arranging parts.

[lawson-stone]

Preface, I have taught jazz theory, improvisation and jazz guitar at the university level. I'm the author of the Sheets of Sound for Guitar series books. I'm well versed in traditional and jazz theory.
---------------------------
Do you realize that theory, in particular -- western theory, is an after-the-fact analysis of composed music? We tend to think of theory as rules and formulas when it's simply a common language used to describe what someone else has done.


The common western theory taught in universities is based on the Baroque period of music (1600–1750).


And then, when jazz came along, we tried to analyze it in terms of Baroque rules and principles. Along came Bird, Trane, Herbie, Chick and up and up.


AND WE ARE STILL USING BAROQUE terminology to describe jazz. Of course, Barris Harris, Hal Galper, Dave Liebman updated these principles and helped usher in a period of what we now refer to as "Jazz Theory".


Of course, we are still taking after-the-fact analysis and attempting to generate rules and regulations about what is valid based on looking at things backwards.


Reality check -- You don't play by the rules. YOU MAKE THE RUlES. The rules will bend to follow what you played. If it sounds good, it *IS* good.


With all that being said, can you play a b9 against a Maj7 chord? Answer, YES OF COURSE YOU CAN. Try taking a tune like "You stepped out of a dream" and for ever tonic, Try using an altered dominant tonality. Does it work? Yes, does it fit the rule books? Who cares!!!


Let's stop trying to use western theory (baroque or otherwise) to govern what we can or cannot do in jazz.


Rules are like labels, jazz is not Mayonnaise.


I'll post some more articles like this in the future, perhaps taking these concepts further.

I agree with this but would add as I'm sure someone already has, the "rules" we infer inductively from successful composition and performance are a description of the dynamics that make that composition or performance work. What a "good" theory does, though, is not merely describe existing data, it also allows reasonable prediction of future results. I'd say the "rules" of theory this start out as descriptive, but rather than being prescriptive, they are instead, predictive. If we want to reproduce a certain musical experience found in an existing composition or performance, we may reasonable hope that by applying the principles that we see operating in that composition, we can probably reproduce the musical results, not duplicating that performance, but in some way reproducing the effect.

In science, "good theory" is simply a model that accounts for all the data, coherently explains how the data of the phenomena produce the effects we see, reasonably predicts future outcomes, and offers an avenue of error detection and self-correction.

I agree with you that if we create music theory less as regulations and more as, well, revelations, insights into what makes certain music "work," we'd likely be doing a lot better.

[Jonah]

I think people should reorient themselves away from the word theory and towards the word composition. In other words, what would they teach in a composition class, whether that is composing a Jazz head or Jazz tune or a four part chorale or rules for arranging parts.

But I am convinced that in classical composition now there is nothing to learn for composition.

You can learn to understand and play and imitate improvise or compose music in old styles but it does not mean you are a composer. Maybe a good musicologist.

[Christian Miller]

I agree with this but would add as I'm sure someone already has, the "rules" we infer inductively from successful composition and performance are a description of the dynamics that make that composition or performance work. What a "good" theory does, though, is not merely describe existing data, it also allows reasonable prediction of future results. I'd say the "rules" of theory this start out as descriptive, but rather than being prescriptive, they are instead, predictive. If we want to reproduce a certain musical experience found in an existing composition or performance, we may reasonable hope that by applying the principles that we see operating in that composition, we can probably reproduce the musical results, not duplicating that performance, but in some way reproducing the effect.

In science, "good theory" is simply a model that accounts for all the data, coherently explains how the data of the phenomena produce the effects we see, reasonably predicts future outcomes, and offers an avenue of error detection and self-correction.

I agree with you that if we create music theory less as regulations and more as, well, revelations, insights into what makes certain music "work," we'd likely be doing a lot better.

I kind of feel like music theory presents itself in this way, but actually it isn't this at all.

[charlieparker]

But I am convinced that in classical composition now there is nothing to learn for composition.

You can learn to understand and play and imitate improvise or compose music in old styles but it does not mean you are a composer. Maybe a good musicologist.

Why are you not a composer if you compose something in a specific style? That seems arbitrary to me. And I think the point is that in order to be a composer it is helpful to learn how to compose a four part chorale.

[James W]

Why are you not a composer if you compose something in a specific style? That seems arbitrary to me.

I suppose it's because of the reason you're doing it. Are you writing the piece in an old style, that is to say a pastiche, because you want it performed and people to listen to it? Not really or at best necessarily. I reckon most of this kind of composition just gets read by some professor or some such.

And I think the point is that in order to be a composer it is helpful to learn how to compose a four part chorale.

Agreed. But it's also helpful even if you have no intention of becoming a composer. It's useful for a prospective musicologist too.

[Jonah]

Why are you not a composer if you compose something in a specific style? That seems arbitrary to me. And I think the point is that in order to be a composer it is helpful to learn how to compose a four part chorale.

Of course learning how music work is always good, but being a true composer is something different though

Especially these days when there is no living conventional common musical language. You either invent all from zero or you refer to the old.

Anyway, what I meant was it is hard for me to define what to teach to people who want to become composers these days... I think one should just learn to be a musician and then can compose if there is any inner urge to do that.
And musicians should be able to write and improvise music in the styles they perform

[RLetson]

Of course learning how music work is always good, but being a true composer is something different though

Especially these days when there is no living conventional common musical language. You either invent all from zero or you refer to the old.

This strikes me as 1) factually untrue and 2) suffering from the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

For 1): There are, to my ear, multiple "conventional common musical language[s]" available to any prospective composer. Whether the conventions and traditions are "living" or not is irrelevant--they're there for the using. Was Fritz Kreisler not a true composer because he wrote his encore pieces in the styles of earlier composers?

For 2): Any time I see "true" as a descriptor, I suspect a normative--an "ought"-- is being applied. In this case, it's the privileging of novelty over continuity. And from what I've seen in all the arts that I've paid attention to, the rule remains "the same, only different." Linear progress is an illusion, since there is nowhere to go except around. A convention-set can seem "exhausted"--until some smartypants finds a new axis around which to turn it and produce an "only different" that audiences can enjoy.

[Jonah]

This strikes me as 1) factually untrue and 2) suffering from the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

For 1): There are, to my ear, multiple "conventional common musical language[s]" available to any prospective composer. Whether the conventions and traditions are "living" or not is irrelevant--they're there for the using. Was Fritz Kreisler not a true composer because he wrote his encore pieces in the styles of earlier composers?

For 2): Any time I see "true" as a descriptor, I suspect a normative--an "ought"-- is being applied. In this case, it's the privileging of novelty over continuity. And from what I've seen in all the arts that I've paid attention to, the rule remains "the same, only different." Linear progress is an illusion, since there is nowhere to go except around. A convention-set can seem "exhausted"--until some smartypants finds a new axis around which to turn it and produce an "only different" that audiences can enjoy.

Ok, I am too old for this... I should not have started

[Christian Miller]

Of course learning how music work is always good, but being a true composer is something different though

I think this is less well understood than it should be

Especially these days when there is no living conventional common musical language. You either invent all from zero or you refer to the old.

I think this is largely true, especially for what we might call modern concert music. It’s increasingly true in popular music too in fact. We see a lot of what might be called ‘neoclassicism’ in pop.

But music has largely shifted over to textural and sound design concerns. The composers I’ve worked with and interacted with in workshops etc seem interested in texture and form first and foremost.

As far as I can see, composition of extended works and related considerations of form and so on remains the preserve of the concert composer.

It was always a stumbling block from those outside of that world trying to work longer works. Gershwin is the classic example, though I love his concert music.

Anyway, what I meant was it is hard for me to define what to teach to people who want to become composers these days... I think one should just learn to be a musician and then can compose if there is any inner urge to do that.
And musicians should be able to write and improvise music in the styles they perform

Agreed.

I think this is a big mistake - people associate improvisation with jazz for historical reasons.

[Jonah]

Old school.. what was considered 'to be a musician'

[charlieparker]

Of course learning how music work is always good, but being a true composer is something different though

Especially these days when there is no living conventional common musical language. You either invent all from zero or you refer to the old.

Anyway, what I meant was it is hard for me to define what to teach to people who want to become composers these days... I think one should just learn to be a musician and then can compose if there is any inner urge to do that.
And musicians should be able to write and improvise music in the styles they perform

Well, for me, composition should be a craft and learning about how people composed in the past is helpful.

I am not that interested in modern classical composers per se. I actually enjoy film composers like John Williams more for the most part and they are certainly steeped in tradition.

That said my comment was originally about theory and jazz. The focus is wrong . Instead the focus should be on composing Jazz lines, voice leading, arranging parts, etc.

To that end studying devices commonly used in the music is valuable if not necessary.

[Jonah]

Well, for me, composition should be a craft and one should learn to compose a certain amount about how people composed in the past.

I am not that interested in modern classical composers per se. I actually enjoy film composers like John Williams more for the most part and they are certainly steeped in tradition.

That said my comment was originally about theory and jazz. The focus is wrong . Instead the focus should be on composing Jazz lines, voice leading, arranging parts, etc.

To that end studying devices commonly used in the music is valuable.

Composing in certain styles is a bit like writing mass books in conventional forms ( using dramatic patterns etc), I do not say it is bad or not fun... But great writers do not attend literature courses.
With music it is different (as one has to master language, spoken language we learn from birth) composition in the past it was a real practice, great composers studied something that was developing right now or was at least a vehicle and foundation for the music of their days.

Of corse I am open... Recently I listened to Castelnuovo Tedeschi pieces , very conventional but they were really good and it was a real music ( not a concept, not exercise, not a sonority but he really experienced some meaning with it, told something)

Movie composing in genral is more of a skil than an art to me... Of course there are also gifted composers in this area but it is very restricted. Basically what Williams can do is to create sometimes a giod theme and the rest is just a technical thing.

As for jazz I understand what you mean but do not feel like a real educational system is possible with jazz, I mean it ys possible but it is something different then... Jazz player should hear, master the instrument and play...
Most original compositions of jazz musicians are rather excersises or drafts for further impro.
Often they deliberately apply some harmonic tool to practice
And most of them treat it also like this.

What is there to study really? Just play what you hear

[RLetson]

While the "literature course" is a fairly recent invention, "great writers" have always studied their predecessors. We don't know for certain about Homer, but Virgil certainly went to school on Homer, and Dante went to school on Virgil and Ovid, and all of the Renaissance poets went to school on their Roman and Greek predecessors. This is the way art works. Every once in a while, somebody does something really surprising--Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Blake in his poems-with-pictures, Joyce in Finnegans Wake--but the mainstream of any artistic tradition is indeed a stream.

And, FWIW, there is a long tradition of formal study of language-based art, going back in Western tradition to Greece and Rome (rhetoric and prosody)--even when the feedstock is natural language, there's still value in studying how the artistic products work. And analysis is distinct from rule-making, though plenty of artistic traditions emphasize formal rule-sets and constraints. Poetry is full of them--see, for example, this nice essay on the history of the sonnet:

Learning the Sonnet | The Poetry Foundation

My examples are all from literature, but everything I know about Western art follows the same pattern. Invention and innovation take place within a historical context, and analysis and "theory" are posterior to practice, even when they are used to fuel new practice. On the other hand, there have always been plenty of artists who are self-taught rather than the products of formal training regimens. But the higher the technical-skill requirements, the more likely it will be that someone will reinvent some form of the academy, devise a practice regimen, produce a rulebook. Though in folk traditions, training often follows an apprenticeship model, and often within families. (See Hawaiian and Roma musical traditions.)

[ragman1]

What is there to study really? Just play what you hear

It's not as simple as that. You won't hear what you don't know and you get what you know from study, whether that study is listening, reading, being taught, lots of practice, or experience over the years. Plus the degree of your own ability to assimilate and perform all this stuff, of course.

[charlieparker]

While the "literature course" is a fairly recent invention, "great writers" have always studied their predecessors. We don't know for certain about Homer, but Virgil certainly went to school on Homer, and Dante went to school on Virgil and Ovid, and all of the Renaissance poets went to school on their Roman and Greek predecessors. This is the way art works. Every once in a while, somebody does something really surprising--Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Blake in his poems-with-pictures, Joyce in Finnegans Wake--but the mainstream of any artistic tradition is indeed a stream.

And, FWIW, there is a long tradition of formal study of language-based art, going back in Western tradition to Greece and Rome (rhetoric and prosody)--even when the feedstock is natural language, there's still value in studying how the artistic products work. And analysis is distinct from rule-making, though plenty of artistic traditions emphasize formal rule-sets and constraints. Poetry is full of them--see, for example, this nice essay on the history of the sonnet:

Learning the Sonnet | The Poetry Foundation

My examples are all from literature, but everything I know about Western art follows the same pattern. Invention and innovation take place within a historical context, and analysis and "theory" are posterior to practice, even when they are used to fuel new practice. On the other hand, there have always been plenty of artists who are self-taught rather than the products of formal training regimens. But the higher the technical-skill requirements, the more likely it will be that someone will reinvent some form of the academy, devise a practice regimen, produce a rulebook. Though in folk traditions, training often follows an apprenticeship model, and often within families. (See Hawaiian and Roma musical traditions.)

I think there is a desire to make the artistic process more mystical than it is an divorce it from craft and study. A magician doesn't reveal their secrets.

Their is a duality here, as Jonah rightly points out, one eventually does have to find their own voice.

[Jonah]

It's not as simple as that. You won't hear what you don't know and you get what you know from study, whether that study is listening, reading, being taught, lots of practice, or experience over the years. Plus the degree of your own ability to assimilate and perform all this stuff, of course.

I thought that is the idea of artistic mind: you do not describe you create what you did not know and you find out

But of course we grow in culture also and it all melts in one

[Jonah]

I think there is a desire to make the artistic process more mystical than it is an divorce it from craft and study. A magician doesn't reveal their secrets.

Their is a duality here, as Jonah rightly points out, one eventually does have to find their own voice.

if I understand the meaning of the word 'mystic' correctly the artistic process is definitely a mystic practice, just by its nature (I do not mean romantic mysticism, I mean mysticism as a mode of perception)

[RLetson]

Before the late 18th century, artistic work was seen less as a matter of inspiration than of craft and expertise and practice--which is not to say that there weren't artists whose work seemed to surpass most others at heroic levels. But in the Renaissance, enormous quantities of very fine work came out of workshops and apprentice-journeyman-master systems of training and organization (not unlike our skilled-trades systems). For every star--Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo--there were dozens of very high-end practitioners who were painters-for-hire. (And some of them were stars, if getting hired as official court portraitists counts.) Haydn was a servant in the Esterhazy court--a valued and high-ranking servant, but one who nevertheless wore Esterhazy livery and produced musical product on demand. Capellmeister was a good gig, but it was a gig. (He became a star when he retired from the Esterhazy court and went freelance.) Bach was a Capellmeister--and not seen as all that much of a star in his own time, let alone as mystically gifted. (He did have a streak of Protestant mysticism in his character, but that belongs to a different set of categories.)

In retrospect, we respond to artists whose work calls out to us, and we see them as somehow different in kind from their contemporaries. A few years back, we walked through the entire Pitti Palace collection in Florence. The Medici clan bought art by the cargo container, and the rooms are filled floor to ceiling with high-level pictures, and it was striking how often a painting seemed to jump off those crowded walls --a Raphael, a Gentileschi, a Caravaggio. We may not know exactly what separates those artists from the their merely extremely competent contemporaries, but I'm not willing to label it mystical. (And in any case, the jump-off-the-wall pictures are not always identified as such in their own time--they can be discovered and rediscovered in different eras. Our collective subjective reactions are what make those lists.)

FWIW, there's a whole conversation worth having about the etymological/semantic family of "myst-" words--mystical, mysticism, mystification, mystery--but probably not on a jazz forum.

[Jonah]

Before the late 18th century, artistic work was seen less as a matter of inspiration than of craft and expertise and practice--which is not to say that there weren't artists whose work seemed to surpass most others at heroic levels. But in the Renaissance, enormous quantities of very fine work came out of workshops and apprentice-journeyman-master systems of training and organization (not unlike our skilled-trades systems). For every star--Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo--there were dozens of very high-end practitioners who were painters-for-hire. (And some of them were stars, if getting hired as official court portraitists counts.) Haydn was a servant in the Esterhazy court--a valued and high-ranking servant, but one who nevertheless wore Esterhazy livery and produced musical product on demand. Capellmeister was a good gig, but it was a gig. (He became a star when he retired from the Esterhazy court and went freelance.) Bach was a Capellmeister--and not seen as all that much of a star in his own time, let alone as mystically gifted. (He did have a streak of Protestant mysticism in his character, but that belongs to a different set of categories.)

In retrospect, we respond to artists whose work calls out to us, and we see them as somehow different in kind from their contemporaries. A few years back, we walked through the entire Pitti Palace collection in Florence. The Medici clan bought art by the cargo container, and the rooms are filled floor to ceiling with high-level pictures, and it was striking how often a painting seemed to jump off those crowded walls --a Raphael, a Gentileschi, a Caravaggio. We may not know exactly what separates those artists from the their merely extremely competent contemporaries, but I'm not willing to label it mystical. (And in any case, the jump-off-the-wall pictures are not always identified as such in their own time--they can be discovered and rediscovered in different eras. Our collective subjective reactions are what make those lists.)

FWIW, there's a whole conversation worth having about the etymological/semantic family of "myst-" words--mystical, mysticism, mystification, mystery--but probably not on a jazz forum.

The periods that you mention like Renaissance in visual arts or baroque and classicism in music are the periods of the highest development of artistic language, it was elaborated to such an extent that even average artist could do very good art just because it was very elaborated technically, one could learn it but it does not make everyone great.

I know what separates a great artist from other artists, a great artist does something that no-one else can do.
It seems very simple definition but it is quite definitive for me.

The fact that social environment and perception of artist in society changes through the history does not change the nature of artist.
And it is not connected with Romantic period conception.

Revelation stays a revelation. Genius stays a genius.
Titian was about 25 when he completed Assunta in Frari, no-one did anything similar before or after him. I mean not that it is about age but in this case age is also astonishing. How ould such a young man know so much about life, love, faith, death?

The artistic soul is transcendent, caesers and countries come and go, manners and cultures and societies change but the artist finds his way through it.

Again I do not romanticize it but I do not like also quite common approach that tries to bring it to the level 'everyone can do it if they just learn..'
No everyone cannot.

there are no guarantees, true artist is always at the edge just because he does only what he can do, so he is always at the edge of the unknown.

As for mysticism on jazz forum... Coltrane?

Anyway, genral education in arts should be practical (learn the tools), personal education in arts should empirical: learn life.

[Christian Miller]

Both things can be true


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[Christian Miller]

The truth of it is that most people are not Titian. In fact the vast majority of working artists are not Titian.

Of course Titian was a painter in an era where painting had a very clear societal function. So painting was a trade. Painters were artisans (and of course often ran studios of artisans.)

And so with music.

(And musicologists and those familiar with the craft itself can still recognise the sheer craft of the ‘nobody’ composers. The anonymous composers even.)

What we have seen over the past few hundred years of technological development is a displacement of the artisan by the machine precisely as the Luddites foresaw. The steady obsolescence of craft.

AI is simply the most recent chapter in this story.

So what is left but the search for genius? The search for genius has led us down some interesting roads. Specifically in music, what I would call the cult of progressivism, which is an interesting one.

But some people really are geniuses. And part of the nature of genius is in how impacts others.

So, for instance, present day ideological hang ups about the validity of the Canon doesn’t make Beethoven any less important, for example.

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