Part Three: Techniques and Ideas

Introduction

'Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.' Jackson Pollock's comment is relevant to the techniques and ideas laid out in this part of the project. They are not meant as complete solutions, but rather as indications of what can be done when one thinks of jazz not as something closed, but as an open concept.

The principles underlying this kind of jazz can be seen in this statement by literary critic Malcolm Cowley: 'I might suggest that the story proper, if it is complete, will include four elements. A person (or group of persons) is involved in a situation and performs an act (or series of acts, or merely undergoes an experience) as a result of which something is changed.'

The application of those concepts to what, in Cowley's words, we might call 'complete' jazz is obvious: a group, in performance, plays a piece and something is affected by that performance. What is affected can be the players, the audience, the piece itself, or any combination of them. It is interesting to note that among the various dictionary definitions of 'affect' is 'to act on (somebody or their feelings) so as to bring about a response'.

The truth behind this idea has been present throughout this project and will be seen again in this final part, which concentrates on more practical areas. These areas are broadly discussed within each section while the appendices and the final section 'Summing Up' will look at the concepts as they have been used in four recent compositions: Three Simple Pieces, Winter Oranges, Bread & Circuses and Oxford Palms.

The section headings are
Where it starts: Idea, Process and Form
What can be seen: The written texture
What can't be seen: The improvised texture
What's beneath the surface: The concepts of space and levels
Summing Up: an analysis of four recent compositions

Where it starts: Idea, Process and Form

When asked which came first, the lyrics or the melody, songwriter Sammy Kahn used to say 'neither. The cheque comes first.' That's sometimes the case in jazz too; if not the cheque for a commission, then the promise of a performance, which provides a reason to write. But, however much one might be paid for a piece, or however important the performance is, there will still remain the problem of how - and perhaps when - to start writing.

There are three concerns in starting a composition, relatively distinct, but overlapping in different ways for different writers, and for different compositions by the same writer.
'The Idea' - that something which starts the whole process of creation.
'The Process' - what happens after you get an idea.
'The Form' - how a composition achieves its shape.

The Idea

'It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints so long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.'

The Idea is the initial premise that leads the composer into a piece, the place from which he or she starts composing. This initial idea, however conceived, can be something specifically musical, perhaps something inspired, a direct gift from heaven, as it were, of a few notes or a complete melody. Perhaps something found by 'doodling' at the keyboard or something created by the desire to write in a particular form such as a blues, a suite, or in an extended form. Perhaps the continued exploration of some previously interesting musical ideas, or the attempt to capture in music the essence of something specific such as a place, a person, or a book.

The initial stimulus to start writing could be something non-musical, a word or phrase, a poem or painting, or just a title, something programmatic or something philosophical. In a phrase, some scrap of something which will be fertile and start to grow in one's mind and eventually lead to music.

When I start writing quite often I have no clue as to what I am going to write, or how it will develop. Like most composers I will spend time just thinking, and perhaps writing words which will later be discarded, gradually immersing myself into the piece. What I'm looking for is an initial musical idea, something unique, something which represents 'me' and where I am at, something which 'breathes the right air'. The idea is the crux of the piece. From that - with work - everything else will develop.

Many of my early ideas were pure musical inspiration, titled after the event. In response to a challenge to write a two chord piece in major instead of the usual minor, I wrote 'Aberdeen Angus', post-titled for the hometown of the intended featured soloist, and its associated breed of cattle. In 'Ryoanji', as discussed elsewhere, the musical inspiration and the title came from a description of that famous Japanese garden.

The idea behind some pieces can be said to be 'generally programmatic'. The title of Shapes, Colours, Energy came from words thought up while planning a piece for a premiere in Banff in the Canadian Rockies. There are obvious musical associations in the words but, equally obviously, while there was no programmatic intent, the images conjured up by those words have much more meaning when one knows the association with the mountains.

Other pieces are developed from what one may call 'philosophical' ideas, which become titles expressing my philosophy towards composition in general. Because of the concentration on the broad picture expressed in the underlying idea, many angles of these concepts are able to be drawn out and developed. The Third Colour was designed to show 'the third colour' between what is written and what is improvised - something expressed in my music many times before but rarely articulated as clearly. New Conditions 'was written to provide each of the band's soloists with a feature which they could work well within but to present them with some new challenges within those sections, to place them in "new conditions".'

Some years later as a requirement of the commissioning process I had to submit a title long before the scheduled performance. After a great deal of thought I chose Charles River Fragments, a conjunction of 15 years since Charles Mingus, an obvious influence, had died; 30 years since I'd left the Berklee School of Music (in Boston, where the Charles River flows); and the realisation that the ideas I had learnt at Berklee and from Mingus had fragmented as I developed my own style. Additionally there was the play on words which could lead me to use fragments of music. The ideas behind the title informed the writing process with the resultant 50 minute composition being derived from a ballad, using each of its motifs, its 'fragments', as starting points for new sections.

Many pieces have been directly inspired by art or literature. These include 'Midnight Blue', 'Adam' and 'Cathedra', where I tried to capture the essence of specific works by the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman, and Symphony of Scorpions, where I wanted to look at the idea of 'levels of divided attention' as expressed in the work of author Malcolm Lowry. A later work, The Day of the Dead, used Lowry's actual words, mostly drawn from his major novel, Under the Volcano.

Having got into the right frame of mind with a lot of thinking around the subject I may be inspired to write down a few notes but, usually, in a process I don't really understand, I go to the piano, and, 'feel' for the right musical shape, be it a chord, a melody or a bass line, that fits in with my thinking. By 'feeling' for an idea I mean literally sitting there and moving the fingers above the keys until, almost like magic, they fall and something musical is there. I don't really understand how it happens, I'm just glad that it works most of the time, and am very aware that the initial immersion in a project has to happen before I can get to this 'magical' stage.

Discovering the fertile idea, that specific melodic motif or a chord needed for a composition to start to develop, is what author Joyce Carey called 'the kick of a horse'. Once properly chosen, no other set of notes will do; even transposing them often seems incorrect. The idea breathes the right air, has a specific 'colour', inhabits a certain space, feels just right. This is part of the mystery of creativity for which I have no explanation.

The Process

Painter Barnett Newman was once described as 'a bow and arrow artist. The act of painting itself is what opens up the possibilities of making those decisions that create the image.' As Robert M Pirsig said: 'You sit and stare and think and search randomly for new information and go away and come back again and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.' I have likened the process to discovering a tiny thread and gradually tweaking it until something more solid starts to emerge.

There may well be important practical considerations attached to a new composition, the technical concerns of a commission or performance opportunity, the expected duration, the size of the band, the rehearsal and performance parameters and so on, but these pale into insignificance besides the problem of finding the language to develop the initial idea into a complete composition. This has been likened to finding a composition's DNA code, that cell inside an organism which informs its growth. Once the code has been found the composition starts to achieve its own identity.

Finding the code may well need another bout of deep thinking but the initial idea will start to develop, new ideas will spin off from it and the composition will start to achieve proportion, to develop its own life.
As Howard Becker said: 'Writing is about discovering what you have to say. Then you go back and edit it to make it look as if you knew where it was heading all along.'

Commenting on this development stage, Pablo Neruda said: 'I would rather write all day, but frequently the fullness of a thought, of an expression, of something that comes out of myself in a tumultuous way - let's label it with an antiquated term "inspiration" - leaves me satisfied, or exhausted, or calmed, or empty. That is, I can't go on.' And Hemingway: '... nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It's the wait until the next day that's hard to get through ... always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling that what you did last was good. Don't wait until you're baffled and stumped.'

Eventually the composition will seem to have found what seems to be its final form. But sometimes it is as if the DNA code has only partially worked, and it may be necessary to tear the composition apart and re-look at it, re-jig the bits into a different shape, until, as Yeats said, 'it comes right with a click, like a closing box'.

Whether, once the creative work is done, you can remember this writing process varies from composer to composer. The composition is out there as an entity, being performed, but the 'how' of its creation is lost. In the words of Django Bates: 'Years later I can't believe I wrote that. The process has gone and all that remains is the music.'

Form

'What is lacking in Ellington is a knowledge of classical forms ... [He] lacked the knowledge and experience necessary for victory. Unity in a large work, organic transition, apt proportions, variety and strategic placement of climaxes - the skill to secure these is not congenital, as are a good ear and melodic inventiveness. This compositional skill has to be learned, by most of us, through patient and wisely-directed study.'

'Jazz has not yet evolved a form capable of utilising its special qualities coherently over an extended time scale. Until it does, ideas of the order of those which gave rise to In the Beginning God must inevitably come stunted to birth.'

'He has largely given up the lateral thinking so common in jazz and in music generally.'

'Tension is built up by juxtaposition and superimposition of solo parts and ensemble, rather than by any routine principle of overall development.'

'The most characteristic thing ... is not the thematic ideas, but rather the feeling of growth, which goes streaming through it. The way in which he creates a unity, in its plenitude of expressions - where hovering, free rhythmic passages stand both in contrast to ­ and mingle with - sharply drawn motifs, while a number of soloists are making their marks with individual contributions.'

The juxtaposition of these quotes on form, from different decades of jazz, is of course deliberate. One could perhaps agree with the first, from composer Robert Crowley writing in 1959 about 'Black, Brown and Beige', if it didn't imply some kind of superiority of classical composers over Duke Ellington. I am more in agreement with the second, from critic Kenneth Dommett writing in the 1960s, but he misses the point. Jazz had changed at the end of the previous decade and, although Ellington was perhaps too set in his ways to be concerned with the new language which had emerged, the potential was there for different forms to develop.

The last three critical comments - from the mid-seventies, the mid-eighties and 2000 respectively - were made about my own music and are encouraging support for my view that a composition should make its own form, that the form, rather than following a pre-determined plan, arises in some way from the DNA discovered in the initial idea during the composing process.

Clement Greenberg has said that Debussy 'often presents the mere texture of sound as the form itself of music'. This is part of my thinking, too, as well as the idea that melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration - what are seen as the 'normal' components of a composition, particularly in jazz - are there to be used as parts of the greater whole, the form and shape of the composition itself.

Underlying this is an idea common to jazz of changing the form in real time. The form becomes flexible as the internal shape of individual sections, and even at times the total overall structure, changes from performance to performance. This concept of structural improvisation, which is discussed in the third section below, is unusual in more formal jazz composition but mirrors what happens in small-group jazz and demonstrates what jazz is, or ought to be, about.

Some critics have used the word 'symphonic' to describe my work. It's not a word I'm keen on, in that it has too many connotations with classical music, but if those critics mean that there is space for things to develop and some depth of meaning, then I'll go along with them. A similar thought was expressed by American guitarist Paul Nash, who asked for some suggestions for works by other European composers to be included alongside mine in a concert in New York. 'It's clear why you like those pieces and composers. They appear to share a similar aesthetic to yours at least in the space and sweep of the mood, things are not crowded with events and everything unfolds in general in a more organic way.'

The things Nash speaks of, space, sweep of mood, everything unfolding in a more organic way, show what the jazz language is capable of. It's a new path, away from the theme and solos-all-round form so common in jazz, yet, while it doesn't try to copy classical forms, the best examples possess the 'breadth of vision' of some of that music, while also showing that jazz is capable of doing something different. Not better, not worse, just different.

'You've taken the audience on a journey,' one musician said about a performance of 'Eggshell Summer', the second movement of Winter Oranges. The piece has a form, it starts quietly with the development of a set of simple three-note chords, moves into a rambunctious solo section built around a 32 bar form (with three distinct moods within each chorus) and ends with a slow, quiet section only loosely related to the opening. Thus it can be seen as a journey, but, as I've said earlier, I can't recall why it developed in this way. Like Topsy, it just grew.

Form is intuitive for me and I wouldn't have it any other way. The blues and 32 bar standard song forms can be useful as 'building blocks' but they are, by definition, limited. Classical composers had, still have in some cases, traditional musical forms to work with but they are not where I want to be.

But what is it - or who possesses it - that gives a 'sense of form'? There are many successful jazz composers writing what I have described elsewhere as 'yard' music (because there is yards and yards of it and, for me, it's enclosed, it goes nowhere). I don't like the language and often it's all waffle, with no meaningful organic development. With some composers I have come across, like Australian Paul Grabowsky, Norwegian Jon Balke and Austrians Christoph Cech and Christian Muelbacher, I can recognise and appreciate their sense of form, they take me on a journey. They have space, and what Paul Nash calls 'sweep of mood'.

However, even though I can appreciate their sense of form, I have difficulty putting what it is into words. The following quotes about the work of other artists touch on various aspects of this dilemma.

'His texture can impose his architecture.' (Muriel Bradbrook on Malcolm Lowry.)

'Ask the fact for the form, and form, once it comes, is free of the fact, is a dance above the fact.' (Charles Tomlinson quoting Emerson in an introduction to the poems of William Carlos Williams.)

'The conversion of the canvas into an active "field" represents a major revolution in the art of painting ... elimination of perspective. The reverberations of the entire canvas or paper supersede compositional structure ... The field of action as dynamic background is the alternative to the traditional plot as a structure of related events; expanding fields of phenomena determine the moods of The Castle and Ulysses. Instead of moving toward a resolution the field remains open, to attract an indefinite quantity of data seemingly placed at random.' (Uncredited; possibly Clement Greenberg.)

'Her performance has the rarest quality known to any art - that of apparent inevitability.' (Martin Amis on Judy Dench in the film Iris.)

'On the level of form, there is no longer any symmetry or traces of recognisable design: the piece is pure development ... It would seem that this is the first time in history that Western music goes radically beyond all traditional ideas of closed form - the form becoming a succession of moments without ending.' (André Boucourechliev on Debussy's La Mer)

'I start a canvas without a thought of what it might eventually become ... Forms take reality for me as I work. In other words, rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work.' (Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews)

As many of the above quotes imply form, like the idea, can be pre-thought but usually derives from the initial idea, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is often impossible to say how the form of a piece developed as it did. Often, as the poet Hart Crane said, one just has to sit and wait. 'It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.'

In an unscientific sampling of my material I found, not surprisingly, that the majority of my pieces are open form, although more standard forms such as the blues do show up in some of the suites. Four groupings emerge:

Suites - where the decision is made to write a series of short pieces which can be musically linked, as in Winter Oranges, or not, as in Three Simple Pieces.

Compositions with a derived form - such as Oxford Palms (see below) and Shapes, Colours, Energy, where different combinations of the three words of the title inspired separate movements which fitted into their own, 'inevitable', overall shape.

Compositions with an abstract form - it just works: The Miró Tile has its own inevitability of form, but, as so often, this is hard to analyse even during the writing, let alone some time afterwards.

Compositions constructed using structural improvising techniques. In two early works, Songs for My Father and Mosaics, the overall structure of the composition was determined by the musicians and the performance situation. The musicians playing the solo cadenzas linking the written sections were asked to suggest, in their soloing, which theme would come next. Some later pieces such as Bread & Circuses, discussed below, have what could be called a 'containing form', an idea which shapes the overall direction without constraining it.

Once one gets into more complicated areas of form there is a constant struggle between the need to 'say something', to make the piece interesting for all concerned, and the requirement to keep it simple, so that it can be easily understood by the players. As I said when developing the ideas for The Third Colour: 'If it's too complicated then it will be hard for the musicians to make sense of it; if it is too simple, then what will be the point...'

I am not interested in writing something that will, in essence, sound the same every time it's played, and I have derived methods which cope with this, expressing my view on what jazz composition should be. Given the plethora of places where change may have been written into a particular composition, there may seem to be an inability to decide on a set form during the writing process, and, perhaps, a worry about the end-result. This is not due to lack of will, but a conscious effort to keep things open. The form of a particular performance is something that one has to find during that particular performance.

Those options are not the concern of the audience. They don't know the piece so they won't know what is 'supposed' to happen, or what 'can happen' when everything clicks. There is no one right answer and if what's written produces a good performance then that is sufficient - until the next time. What is also important is that the piece retains its identity. In my very early days I wrote in the liner notes to Down Another Road that 'the ferocity with which John Marshall and Harry Beckett play 'Aberdeen Angus' makes it into almost a different animal'. In a subsequent review, critic Charles Fox added: 'it may be a different animal, but it still has the owner's name on the collar'.

Appendix

The two quotes in the Introduction are from Jackson Pollock, quoted in Jackson Pollock, Energy Made Visible, by BH Friedman (Da Capo Press, 1995), and Malcolm Cowley, from his fascinating memoir And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (Viking Press, 1978). The opening quote in The Idea is from a famous statement by Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottleib and Barnett Newman, quoted in Paths to the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2000).
The series of quotes which open The Form come from composer Robert Crowley, quoted in Max Harrison's A Jazz Retrospect (Quartet Books, 1991), Kenneth Dommett, writing in Music & Musicians in 1967, and critiques of my work from the Finn Thor Forsskåhl, Englishman Barry McRae, and Dane Boris Rabinowitsch. The Hart Crane quote was found in The Portable Malcolm Cowley (Penguin Books, 1990). There is some very interesting material on form in Painting Outside the Lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art by David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Further notes on Idea, Process, Form

The four compositions discussed below are analysed further in the final section, Summing Up, where full details of availability are given.

Three Simple Pieces

The idea was to feature four known soloists in their strong areas in a new, pre-titled, piece written to fit into a specific 60th birthday celebration programme of my works.

As I said at the time about the process: 'a new "birthday" composition specially written for the concerts in London and Copenhagen ... One that isn't terribly complicated, but that shows me where I am now ... Shouldn't I just write something? The mature artist presenting a new piece for a special occasion? Sounds good. But how to start? - the usual question - and what form will it take? - or, again as usual, what form will develop when the writing starts...?'

The form was pre-decided as three pieces to be played without a break. During the writing process these became slow, medium and fast with no obvious connections between them. The ballad called for a simple theme-solo-theme form, while the second piece developed from an open-form repetitive rhythmic pattern with a series of independent melodies freely introduced against the observing soloist. The third piece, again open-form, is 'energy based', with ensemble fragments freely introduced against a strong soloist, and leads to a freely directed coda.

Winter Oranges

The initial idea came from the move to Spain and the orange tree on our terrace, which has fruit through the winter. The idea for the composition's development into a four part suite with loose biographical undertones ('Blue Spring', 'Eggshell Summer', 'Tinted Autumn', 'Winter Oranges') came from realising that this was a time of my own 'winter oranges', the encouraging flowering of my career as I worked through my 60s.

From contemporary notes on the idea: ''Tinted Autumn' remains a good title, but it is perhaps less that than 'planting autumn', a time for things to develop, for my ideas to settle in, to articulate what I had been doing for a long time but never clearly expressed. That expression comes in the final section, 'Winter Oranges', but the slow germination is in 'Tinted Autumn' ... Is this kind of anthropomorphism true of the first two? 'Blue Spring' is meant to be young, developing, full of energy and ideas being thrown around, which sort of fits; 'Eggshell Summer' is edgy, not yet knowing quite what's happening, neither young nor mature.'

From contemporary notes on process: 'One route (in writing for an established radio band) is to write an intellectual challenge to the players, odd times, hard chords, while the underlying ideas remain mine and are directed by me. Another route is to write something where good music can be created by them working together in a freer way than they are used to. Quite possibly the latter will do them more good, but the former is what they will go for more ... I may be more than a little worried about the situation. I shouldn't be. I know I have enough techniques to produce good music and I need to be satisfied with the certainty that I can make it work although there may be a few in the band who resist the new ideas ...

'The DNA as I call it is generally some chord or set of chords or melodic motifs, or rhythm ... What if I tried to find four chords that summed up each of these aspects... which may have cracked it: four three-note chords which make up the whole twelve but also serve as launching off points for ideas - fairly basic at this time but they may work ... They seem to sit nicely; and I mustn't forget that above all my style rests on keeping it simple...'

Bread & Circuses (Panem et circenses)

The idea developed from the title, which I had 'saved' some time before. It was used because, in an odd kind of way, it was apt for this particular commission, to write a piece which showed off my techniques in a way that could be used by various levels of musicians for a proposed DVD project. As well as the hard-work of working with new ideas (the necessary bread, as a reward for work), there could be fun in the performance (the circuses, provided to keep the peasants happy).

From contemporary notes on process: 'The idea for this period is to write some new music which I can use in Norway and later, and which will also serve as a focus for the DVD project. There are devices which I can isolate such as 'mud', thickening, shadowing, etc. All these can be used in a piece or can be treated as isolated elements from which the student can learn... Perhaps a series of 'miniatures' which first isolate, then combine these, and other, ideas.

'Another factor came up because of the (amateur jazz-course) concert we saw last night: that people (teachers and students) are trying - and, almost by definition, failing - to achieve the technique to play this (bebop based) music, when they could be using their time, and their limited technique, being creative.... as someone said "music in terms of sound, not notes, harmonies, chords".'

In terms of form, structural improvising techniques are used on a micro level within the various episodes, and on a macro level with the construction of the composition from the overall containing form. (More details are given in later sections of this project.)

Oxford Palms

The idea came during the early writing process as I decided to interweave two pieces, inspired by the idea behind William Faulkner's Wild Palms. In my notes at the time I wrote 'Each story grabs you and then suddenly you are back in the other ... can this be done musically? Yes, if the ideas are strong enough and there is a sense of it being unfinished, that something is going to happen when one strand stops.' (The title came from the connection between Oxford, England, the site of the premiere, and Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Missouri.)

From contemporary notes on process: 'Faulkner has two interlocking novels "each of which is informed by its juxtaposition with the other". Musically the idea could work well if each is altered by a sharp change to another mood, but, unlike Faulkner, I feel I have to connect the two more obviously - by using some common elements and linking the two ideas in the final section. A purer version might work but, as always, the composition takes over and decides its own structure. To deny that would, I feel, be wrong.'

The overall form came from the initial idea. The two juxtaposed musical ideas are an altered blues form and a ballad, each of which developed in interesting ways during the writing process.

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