So I have decided for my second piece that I am going to write a 12 tone jazz work. My original line of thought was that the jazz idiom would be my cliche, and I would recontextualize it using the language of serialism. After mentioning to a friend of mine that I was thinking of doing a 12 tone jazz piece, his immediate reaction was "Oh, so the cliche is serialism", which made me realize, that I guess you could rightfully call serialism a cliche in the 21st century. I think this is neat, because depending on perspective, my piece could be working on either cliche, or perhaps both, in which case I would be combining the two cliches. I suppose it does not really matter either way, but it is a neat thing to think about.
On to the piece itself, it is being written for a pretty standard jazz quartet of guitar, piano, bass and drums. It opens up with a passage (the head of the piece you could say), that actually ISN'T based on serialism, but rather a pitch set. However, I used this pitch set to derive my tone row, so the two are closely related. The first incarnation of the tone row that I used was for the walking bass part. I was very specific about the pitches I chose, as I wanted to make it sound "jazzy", that is, I wanted the walking bass part to actually sound like it could be used in a jazz piece, not just a random collection of notes. The tritone and the semitone were the two intervals that prevailed through this process and seem to be what holds the row together and gives it unity. So after writing various bass lines using various row forms, I got to the process of writing the "solo" parts above it, for which I also used varying row forms.
At this point, I came to the realization that to maitain the spirit of jazz in my piece, that a certain degree of improvisation was in order. It would be difficult for the walking bass, or soloing instruments to improvise their part, as their pitch material is based on a row form, so I decided that the improv aspect of the piece would be left to the drum part and comping instruments. Since the drums don't have to worry about pitch, their improvisational process is much easier and more standard than what I have in mind for the comping instruments. What I intend to do is, much like on a lead sheet, where you would have your chords written out which would be used as a basis for improvisation, I intend to break up whichever row the accompanying instrument will be using into dyads, trichords, tetrachords etc. then place them over each measure. For example, the first measure will have the first three notes of the row, the next will have the next 5 notes of the row and so on until that row form is used up. Then they will be free to use these pitches to comp in whatever way they see appropriate.
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