Le 29 juin 2017
de 9h30 à 10h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Stylistic Features of Jazz
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Paulo Perfeito
The paper Pitch-Class Sets in Jazz Composition and Improvisation presents a creative method to coalesce traditional jazz with techniques and elements of post-tonal composition.
Since very early in the history of jazz, composers made numerous attempts to combine it with erudite music. Throughout the 20th century classical composers came up with several aesthetic and conceptual developments but jazz, until very recently, did not move in the same direction. To maintain a fruitful collaboration between composers and improvisers, if the pallet of compositional techniques available to the jazz composer expands, I would argue that a similar development must occur in the field of improvisation. For composers, this paper proposes creative process stretching beyond the familiar tonal or modal schemes and, in the interest of coherence and unity with pre-composed material, it offers a complementary approach to soloists.
In a jazz context, some pitch class sets are more appealing than others because of their melodic and intervallic properties and therefore will be studied more comprehensively than others. For example (025) is a fundamental building block of the pervasive pentatonic/blues scale, (0258) outlines a rootless altered dominant chord and (027) outlines the idiosyncratic voicing in fourths. Since one this project’s emphasis is improvisation, a practice where memory plays a crucial role to both the listener and the performer, the use and study of pitch-class sets will be limited to non-ordered trichords and tetrachords.
