Lyle MaysコミュのLyle Maysの作曲方法

Lyle Maysの作曲方法ですが英語です。

Compositional Process, Lyle Mays

Jazz composition is a tricky phrase. There is a jazz compositional tradition - a way of writing that's strictly a vehicle for soloing. But for me the composing tradition is predominantly a Western European tradition. I'm wrestling with a way to reconcile these two traditions - how to allow room for the improviser and how to explore the material in a written way as well. It's fertile territory and I don't think that I've been that successful at it so far. But I don't think there are many examples of anyone being that successful at it. These two arenas seem to be like oil and water. It may be that it's possible tojoin them but that's the task I've set before myself.

I want to deal in longer forms. What I've tried to do in the Pat Metheny group is introduce further exploration of the material in the context of a blowing jazz group. One of the things I like to put in the music is a kind of condensed development section or some additional piece of music that takes the material and looks at it from a slightly different angle. On my first record there is a piece called "Highland Aire", which contains a fairly conventional exposition of three themes and then a solo, but after the solo rather than just going back to the head it goes to another section based on different changes and the melodic motifs seem to be leading the way. I haven't been content for the solo to be the only way in which the material is developed.

So often the way jazz composition is taught implies that 50 or 60 percent of the music will be invented by the rhythm section and we just focus on this little part writing. Tune writing is approached like that - there's melody and chords, as if that alone defines music. Even more elaborate study of jazz counterpoint deals with the sections of the big band as if the music is defined by the horns and the rhythm section exists somewhere else. The biggest lacking I hear in most jazz composers is this blind spot where all the elements of music are not dealt with. I've tried to build up the music from every perspective possible, rhythmic as well as melodic, and to get completely away from the notion of "Chord". It's a possibly useful reduction of music after the fact and enables jazz musicians to play on a song, but it has to be understood as what it is - a reduction of the music, a shorthand, and doesn't really describe the music and to start out writing a piece of music with a chord I think is a huge mistake and people who still think of music in terms of chords have kind of missed the point.

Outside of the jazz realm, the challenge is to write music without any preconceived groove and to make the music flow from just the notes without relying on the propulsion of the rhythm section. The piece I wrote for the group Marimolin, entitled, "Somewhere in Maine", is the most un-jazz like piece I've ever written, without the crutch of a groove. I came up with a notion of a harmonic realm defined by fifths where there was no real way of writing out what the chords are. Even if the notes line up to form what we might call a minor seventh chord - that's just a sound and in no way a G minor ninth implies a C seventh and F major to follow.

Regarding that composition, I improvised about twenty seconds of music and I wrote a 12 minute piece from that. I improvised the main idea and that first motif came out like a piece in itself, analogous to an improviser playing free. The difference is that I didn't go on improvising. I think the germ of all composition is always improvised. If you can't come up with this original kernel you can't compose. I put those 20 seconds through the mill and developed sub-themes from sub- themes and on and on. You could take any three measures and find how the music is derived from the original kernel.

The notion of how thematic material is developed has been stated in confused ways. There's a kind of poetic transformation where a motif is stretched out not in a strict mathematical way. A good composer will not just double the length of the notes. He will fit that idea of lengthening the material into a kind of invented transformation. There's an element of the poetic in what happens. There's so much that goes into the informing of that notion. The impulse may be I'm going to lengthen this motif and you may start by doubling the rhythmic values. But then the good composer or improviser instinctively changes the material as it goes through the filter. There's two parts to the filter. One is the algorhythmic where you describe the formula of what you're doing and there's an idea and impulse there. The second filter (and this is what can't really be taught) is what the good composer or improviser does with material as it goes through the algorhythm. There's an additional development of the idea - the poetic, an additional transformation which cannot be described in algorhythmic terms and to me that's the fascinating part.

As you put more and more poetic transformations on the material, you lose those exact relationships and the relationships become more and more tenuous. Those connections show up in a more abstract sense of "belonging" - a feeling that this material belongs together.

So I'm focusing on how to develop that side. I've never been content with any of the ways creativity has been described because you can't put it in a formulaic way - to write the algorhythm for creativity. It's been fascinating to get as much information about this process as possible because it's the hinge point of whether or not a piece of music has value. When we make judgments in music we are responding to that point in time where there was impulse and that impulse was acted on with poetic transformation.

People have tried to understand this process in terms of a system and I think that necessarily breaks down because I don't think music can ever be systematic. Music that doesn't go outside the system sounds boring to us no matter what the system. It's the elements outside the system that gives it the spice. As Dave Samuels calls it "the verbs". Music that stays on G major for five minutes is like one noun and no verbs. Systems can be interesting springboards and lead someone to an interesting place but once there you're still faced with that problem or opportunity of what to do with that algorhythm, that impulse. A system can generate algorhythms but you still have to transform them for it to become an artistic thought, to contain the kind of information we want to get from music.

I can't describe that process of transformation and I don't think anyone ever has completely. We can't say exactly what it is but we can have all these approximations of it, or we can talk about one element of it but that doesn't tell us the others. We can talk about the context in which a composer has to make these transformations.

I think of music ideas as your bank account and when you need to have a musical idea you make a withdrawal from your bank account. If there's nothing on your bank account you can't withdraw anything. And that's one of the things that informs this key point in time where there is this transformation of the impulse. The bank account analogy works - how much information is there to draw on to transform it but if one hasn't put in the time to oil that mechanism it won't work.

And then there's a critical aspect. Once you've had a musical idea and you've applied some algorhythm to it and you've gotten it out in the state you imagined it then you have to have a critical reaction to it. It's essential for the composer and improviser to put that idea through that critical filter and that's another area which needs to be developed. If you can't talk critically about music and describe specifically what is good or bad about a piece there will be a weakness in the chain.

There's a point where instinct comes into play too. There's definitely a stage where your instinct tells you to go this way - points of genuine inspiration. You can't eliminate that from the equation. But even the inspiration is informed by these same things we've been talking about. So no matter what aspect of the creative process you're talking about you can still get back to what's informing that process. I try to get my students listening in more critical ways, those more helpful ways, trying to get their bank accounts built up, try to get their withdrawal mechanisms functioning more smoothly, and to get their critical faculties more advanced to take them to the place where they can talk about what's boring about a piece or what might make it better or what makes something else in a similar piece work.

The tune "Slink" illustrates some of these ideas. It was composed in a very contrapuntal style - three melodic lines that fit together to provide all the rhythmic and harmonic motion. You can find within the first five notes of the lower part a relationship that repeats in a transformed way - an ascending fifth and an approach note to another ascending fifth. The approach note makes all the difference in the world. I hesitate to talk about that one note in terms of such lofty ideas such as inspiration. It's a transformation of the opening ascending fifth, but there's a lot that goes into that. Instead of just repeating an idea literally, what causes the improviser or composer to repeat this idea up a major third and use an approach note. Even in this small microcosmic example, is the importance of the poetic transformation.