A Study of Long-Form Works for the Jazz Ensemble

<p>Reflections (In Mosaic) is a long-form work written for a modern jazz orchestra. While made up of seven smaller parts, it is intended to be listened to as a single continuous performance. Reflections (In Mosaic) serves as an exploration into formal structures more complex than the standard blues and cyclical AABA forms. This is achieved through the use of inter-related musical themes, transitional material that develops musical themes and propels the story of the piece forward, programmatic themes, and a consideration towards a more integrative approach to improvised sections in a modern jazz composition context. This exegesis features a comprehensive musical and topical analysis of four case studies: Duke Ellington’s Harlem (1951), Charles Mingus’s Fables of Faubus (1959), Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959), and Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’s The Way Up (2005). In my analysis I examine the features of long-form works from a range of different angles through discussions on: (1) the formal features of the symphonic jazz genre and the integration of concert-style gestures into the jazz big band tradition, (2) the role performance and improvisation can have in communicating an idea within a composed structure, (3) the use of programmatic themes, and (4) a model for a structural design which draws on comparisons to narrative structure. Of particular importance to my compositional project is the use of a programmatic theme. Reflections is directly inspired by the film Magnolia (1999), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I do not attempt to mirror the narrative or structure of the film in Reflections but, instead, loosely base the composition on the film’s characters and topical themes. The culmination of this exegesis is a discussion of how the four case studies informed my own compositional processes.</p>

A Study of Long-Form Works for the Jazz Ensemble

<p>Reflections (In Mosaic) is a long-form work written for a modern jazz orchestra. While made up of seven smaller parts, it is intended to be listened to as a single continuous performance. Reflections (In Mosaic) serves as an exploration into formal structures more complex than the standard blues and cyclical AABA forms. This is achieved through the use of inter-related musical themes, transitional material that develops musical themes and propels the story of the piece forward, programmatic themes, and a consideration towards a more integrative approach to improvised sections in a modern jazz composition context. This exegesis features a comprehensive musical and topical analysis of four case studies: Duke Ellington’s Harlem (1951), Charles Mingus’s Fables of Faubus (1959), Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959), and Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’s The Way Up (2005). In my analysis I examine the features of long-form works from a range of different angles through discussions on: (1) the formal features of the symphonic jazz genre and the integration of concert-style gestures into the jazz big band tradition, (2) the role performance and improvisation can have in communicating an idea within a composed structure, (3) the use of programmatic themes, and (4) a model for a structural design which draws on comparisons to narrative structure. Of particular importance to my compositional project is the use of a programmatic theme. Reflections is directly inspired by the film Magnolia (1999), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I do not attempt to mirror the narrative or structure of the film in Reflections but, instead, loosely base the composition on the film’s characters and topical themes. The culmination of this exegesis is a discussion of how the four case studies informed my own compositional processes.</p>

An analysis of the bass playing of Scott LaFaro as part of the Bill Evans Trio 1959 - 1961

<p>Scott LaFaro is widely regarded as a highly interactive bass player, and within the context of the Bill Evans Trio it is commonly believed he was able to cast aside the traditional time keeping role of the jazz bassist. His considerable reputation seems to rest on this understanding, but as this exegesis aims to show, the general understanding of his legacy within jazz history is open to question More broadly, this exegesis highlights the fact that any claims about his legacy are supported by very limited analysis of his techniques and approaches, rendering any absolute portrayal of LaFaro misleading. This exegesis aims to provide a thorough analysis of LaFaro’s performances within the Bill Evans Trio. By analysing a representative sample of his work in that context, I hope to discover common techniques and traits that LaFaro employed on a regular basis and which characterise his unique approach to bass playing within a small jazz ensemble. With the identification of these characteristics, a clearer picture of Scott LaFaro can begin to emerge, as can a more accurate understanding of his legacy.</p>

An analysis of the bass playing of Scott LaFaro as part of the Bill Evans Trio 1959 - 1961

<p>Scott LaFaro is widely regarded as a highly interactive bass player, and within the context of the Bill Evans Trio it is commonly believed he was able to cast aside the traditional time keeping role of the jazz bassist. His considerable reputation seems to rest on this understanding, but as this exegesis aims to show, the general understanding of his legacy within jazz history is open to question More broadly, this exegesis highlights the fact that any claims about his legacy are supported by very limited analysis of his techniques and approaches, rendering any absolute portrayal of LaFaro misleading. This exegesis aims to provide a thorough analysis of LaFaro’s performances within the Bill Evans Trio. By analysing a representative sample of his work in that context, I hope to discover common techniques and traits that LaFaro employed on a regular basis and which characterise his unique approach to bass playing within a small jazz ensemble. With the identification of these characteristics, a clearer picture of Scott LaFaro can begin to emerge, as can a more accurate understanding of his legacy.</p>

Creating New Standards: Jazz Arrangements Of Pop Songs

<p>This study involves the research, analysis, and performance of existing arrangements of songs that have been played and recorded by jazz musicians, and are identifiable as pop songs of the last thirty years. This project will discuss the development of these songs as new repertoire in the jazz idiom. In particular it will examine transcriptions of arrangements by Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, Brad Meldau, Charlie Hunter, Christian McBride, and Bob Belden. The analysis of these transcriptions will consider the techniques these musicians used in their arrangements including reharmonisation, melodic interpretation, rhythm, and restructuring of the form of the original song. Further, the techniques identified in the analyses will be applied in the creation of new arrangements of similar songs from that era for jazz ensemble of various sizes.</p>

Creating New Standards: Jazz Arrangements Of Pop Songs

<p>This study involves the research, analysis, and performance of existing arrangements of songs that have been played and recorded by jazz musicians, and are identifiable as pop songs of the last thirty years. This project will discuss the development of these songs as new repertoire in the jazz idiom. In particular it will examine transcriptions of arrangements by Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, Brad Meldau, Charlie Hunter, Christian McBride, and Bob Belden. The analysis of these transcriptions will consider the techniques these musicians used in their arrangements including reharmonisation, melodic interpretation, rhythm, and restructuring of the form of the original song. Further, the techniques identified in the analyses will be applied in the creation of new arrangements of similar songs from that era for jazz ensemble of various sizes.</p>

God et al.— World-Making as Collaborative Improvisation: New Metaphors for Open Theists

The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the ultimate author of this world, while allowing us to be, while less than co-authors, more than mere enactors of a pre-written piece. These metaphors are particularly well-suited to illustrate and flesh out an Open Theistic view of things.

Giving Voice to a Foxtrot from Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preserves a number of manuscripts of popular songs arranged by members of the Auschwitz I Men’s Orchestra. These songs, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper, often bear highly ironic, but also tragically relevant titles, such as “Letters That Never Arrived,” “Hours That One Can Never Forget,” “Sing a Song When You’re Sad.” In this article I describe the complex process of realizing a 2018 concert performance and recording of one of these songs, “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens” (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), based on a manuscript deposited in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1975. Originally a 1941 popular song composed by the German film composer Franz Grothe with a text by Willi Dehmel, and scored for a jazz ensemble, it was arranged by the Auschwitz I prisoners for four first violins, five second violins, a viola, two clarinets, a trombone and a tuba. Through this dramatic change in orchestration, errors were occasionally introduced; in this article, I detail the analytical processes involved in correcting these errors and making “micro-interventions” in the score.

Jazz Bass Transcription Using a U-Net Architecture

In this paper, we adapt a recently proposed U-net deep neural network architecture from melody to bass transcription. We investigate pitch shifting and random equalization as data augmentation techniques. In a parameter importance study, we study the influence of the skip connection strategy between the encoder and decoder layers, the data augmentation strategy, as well as of the overall model capacity on the system’s performance. Using a training set that covers various music genres and a validation set that includes jazz ensemble recordings, we obtain the best transcription performance for a downscaled version of the reference algorithm combined with skip connections that transfer intermediate activations between the encoder and decoder. The U-net based method outperforms previous knowledge-driven and data-driven bass transcription algorithms by around five percentage points in overall accuracy. In addition to a pitch estimation improvement, the voicing estimation performance is clearly enhanced.