Preamble: Since writing my article on Music and Evolution, I have received many emails asking the same question: How does harmony and the movement of chords function in conjunction with the harmonic series and our ability to predictively ‘hear’ simple resolutions to complex wave relationships? This article will try to answer that question by delving […]
Continue readingVoice from the Past: Escape from Yugoslavia & My Grandfather’s Ominous Warning
I. Prologue My family on both sides were Germans from Hessen who migrated to Hungary in the 1720s, likely for economic reasons. Over a century later, Emperor Franz Josef I announced that he would allow Protestants to settle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the region now known as Croatia. They moved there in 1865, but […]
Continue readingStrange Bedfellows: Jazz and Pop and Heinrich Schenker?
I. A Brief Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) was an Austrian musician, composer, and most notably, music theorist whose ideas about analyzing and explaining music were groundbreaking and successful. Along with other theories, like Allen Forte’s “Set Theory” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Serialism” (two mathematically oriented theories of analysis (Set Theory) and music composition […]
Continue readingMusic and Evolution: Hearing Math, Seeing Sound, and Other Unanswered Questions
Music and Evolution: A Brief Overview The evidence presented in the research on music and evolution, beginning with Darwin himself,[1] focusses largely on music’s purported ability to support “mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion,”[2] language development,[3] and other things. The prevailing evolutionary theories about music follow Darwin’s lead—they are predominately sociological, cultural, […]
Continue readingA Tale of Two Genres: The Surprising Similarities in the Development of Jazz and Classical Music
Jazz and classical music are two of the most monumental achievements in human history. Together, they encompass a range of expressive capability that is simply astounding, giving voice to the human experience from centuries past to the present and in doing so, enriching our lives immeasurably. This is more remarkable when one considers that they […]
Continue readingJack Hues and the Muse: The First Thing You Need is Music
In the world of rock and pop music, the most successful musicians and groups tend to emerge in their early 20s with a burst of creativity that few can sustain past a handful of recordings. Unlike in classical music and jazz, where musicians and composers continually develop and evolve well into old age, rock musicians generally […]
Continue readingThe Touch of Your Lips, Part III: The Essential Touch in Jazz Piano
It would be nice and tidy if the development of tone color as a primary in jazz piano matched its development in the other instruments, but that is not the case. From early on in jazz’s history, composers and bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and others were focused on the different tone […]
Continue readingThe Touch of Your Lips, Part II: Touch and Tone Color in Jazz Piano
As mentioned in Part I, tone color took on a prominent role in classical music in the 19C. The Romantic composers like Wagner, Strauss, Berlioz, Chopin and many others were, I think it is fair to say, somewhat obsessed with it. The composers before them were certainly aware of tone color, but it was […]
Continue readingThe Touch of Your Lips: The Colors of Jazz Piano
The idea that pianists are able to create different tone colors and different timbres on the instrument has been passionately discussed for well over a century. For some performers, the sound can be a musical identifier on par with a fingerprint, which is a strong argument for their ability to coax a wide array of […]
Continue readingHot Fusion II: U.K.’s First Album “U.K.”
Prologue: In the second part of this series, I laid out my criteria for what would constitute a fusion of jazz and rock that remained true to both styles, which, in my definition, means that the resultant music would have to appeal to both rock and jazz fans, which is not an easy task. Steely […]
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