It Don't Mean a Thing
I'm working on something jazzy right now and my compositional approach has changed. I spend more time at the piano because I can't really hear the chords I want to write. I have to try them out. Here's the thing: I have the most success finding the sound I want not by thinking about the chords, but rather by positioning my fingers into configurations that experience has shown me are likely to be successful, and then throwing them at the keyboard. I, the least kinesthetic person on earth, am feeling my way through this piece. Banging my way, really.
Routinely I find the pitches simply don't matter. Certain intervalic relationships must be present, but there's a lot of leeway--major vs. minor, perfect vs. diminished or augmented. There's a tired old joke that classical musicians ignorantly believe that, in jazz, it doesn't matter what notes you play, that it's all about keeping things plausible through boldness and fluency. Maybe I'm revealing my ignorance here, but hey, I gotta speak the truth as I see it: individual notes don't matter.
Maybe what I'm writing isn't really jazz. Ah, that's the problem: we haven't carefully defined our terms! Let the pointless semantic head-butting begin!
Labels: Composition, Creativity
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
1 Comments:
Back in another life when I was composing and arranging choral stuff, I could "hear" much of what I was putting down. But I challenge you to the title of of "least kinesthetic person on earth" as when I would play back what I had written down I would inevitably play one or more wrong notes. These wrong notes were often better than what I had written and would become part of the score. So fie on piano lessons-they ruin creativity!
Alan
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