An all instruments harmony/improvisation class. This course explores XXth century contemporary music techniques to expand and enrich jazz harmony and improvisation. These techniques may be mixed with more traditional types of jazz harmony such as cadences and harmonic sequences.
Topics Include
- Non-common practice combinations of added tones
- Polytonality (including use in a tonal context)
- Non-diatonic bass tones (slash chords on the border of polytonality)
- Pandiatonicism
- How to use modes mixed with blues and other standard jazz forms. Includes pentatonic, symmetrical, and synthetic modes.
- Twentieth Century contemporary piano repertoire as a mine of ideas for Jazz and Contemporary Music.
- Intervallic structures – chords and lines. Chords can be generated from intervals instead of diatonic scales, adding to our harmonic palette. These are based on intervals and do not necessarily yield themselves to harmonic analysis. The linear techniques used by Schoenberg are extremely interesting to the jazz and contemporary musician. These include: inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion.
- Directed Compositional Exercises. This is a series of compositions based on different parameters of contemporary music, mixed with forms and techniques associated with Jazz.