Nice Company

At cellars and lofts:

A Mystical View, Some Quarter Century Before "Interstellar Space"

"Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and with athleticism, the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc. ... Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire (when was it easier to understand Juvenal?). Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy—it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. ... It is therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo... (but without an echo, no art.)" - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Other philosophers on Interstellar Space are here and here. 

Blues: Coltrane, "Mars" and Harris, Symphony No. 7

The substrate for the best American music is the blues (including van der Merwe’s broader notion of the “popular style”), even when the musician in question is a mid-20th century symphonist: note the variable third in the cello right from the start of Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 3. 

Or take, for example, the strikingly and perhaps unexpectedly similar descending gestures, clearly identifiable as "blues" (4 -♭5 - 4 -♭3 - 1), that end local phrases in both John Coltrane’s “Mars” from Interstellar Space (1967) and Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 7 (1955) — at 1:26 and 6:33, respectively, of the recordings below. (Harris's figure continues with one extra tone, the lower ♭7.)

Brief observations like this don't usually make it to the blog: for more, follow me on Twitter.

Alto Genealogy

Rudy Williams, Charles Mingus’s cousin, with Tadd Dameron’s band at the Royal Roost in 1948 — a precursor to Eric Dolphy? 

Pete La Roca's (Old) Boom Bap

Every time I listen to John Coltrane Quartet's "Liberia," recorded live at the Jazz Gallery in (June of?) 1960, I am a bit surprised to hear what Pete La Roca plays from 4:55 to 5:09. It always strikes me as wonderfully anachronistic, not quite of its time. (Perhaps one could say the same thing about most of what is played here by Coltrane and the quartet generally.)

Those better versed in the musical history of the drumset are invited to comment and disabuse me of my misapprehension. 

Emergent Tonal Structure in the Transpositions of the "A Love Supreme" Motif

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the recording of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. As part of his Twitter homage to that record, Miles Okazaki tweeted the transpositions of the "A Love Supreme" motif—set-class (025)—in the key of the tenor saxophone. 

F G D Ab Db C D Eb Ab Db A F D Ab B E B Db Eb Bb C G D E Gb G Ab F (the modulations beginning at 4:54) #ALoveSupreme50
— Miles Okazaki (@milesokazaki) December 9, 2014

Ethan Iverson replied to point out that this sequence exhibits full chromatic saturation. Okazaki responded with a quote from Ravi Coltrane, and a photo from John Coltrane's score indicating that the inclusion of transpositions through all twelve keys was intentional. 

@milesokazaki As you know, this has all 12 keys. Any other mathematical reason for this particular sequence? cc: @dan__voss
— Ethan Iverson (@ethan_iverson) December 9, 2014

@ethan_iverson I've heard differing opinions. In Kahn's book, Ravi says "deliberately random." Coltrane's score says: pic.twitter.com/FDDwvDSi3Z
— Miles Okazaki (@milesokazaki) December 9, 2014

I answered by listing the transpositions in terms of interval class, which highlights how transpositions by whole-steps and fourths (ic2 and ic5) predominate. As Lewis Porter showed, these intervals—which also comprise the set-class (025)—underlie the composition of the entire suite.

.@ethan_iverson @milesokazaki Transpositions by interval class: 256512155443635522525522113 Steps &fourths prevail as elsewhere in the suite
— dan voss (@dan__voss) December 9, 2014

We could certainly speculate about why Coltrane found it necessary to "move freely" "in all 12 keys." But perhaps the indication in his score to "start & end in E♭ concert minor" is more suggestive. Indeed, I find myself inclined to hear the sequence of transpositions—despite the chromaticism—as fairly tonal in its higher-level voice-leading.

Coltrane's transpositions of the (025) motif initially outline an F minor triad. There is a step-wise ascent to the third, with the second scale-step G expanded by its lower dominant, and the fifth, displaced to the lower octave, is approached by its upper neighbor D♭. Next the seventh is reached by step, extending the tonic F minor triad to a seventh chord. 

The transpositions then proceed through two clicks on the circle of fifths to the submediant, D♭. To my hearing, this previously-foreshadowed upper neighbor (indicated by the flags above) to the fifth degree of the tonic F minor is prolonged and transferred to the lower register. The rising fourth of A♭ to D♭ is repeated as a transposition up a semitone and expanded by arpeggiation from the lower third. I have spelled this "D minor triad" enharmonically as E♭♭ to indicate that it can be heard to function as a Phrygian II to the prolonged D♭, and because the preceding D♭ does not sound merely like a chromatic neighbor but is additionally reinterpreted as a leading tone. Subsequently, Coltrane returns to the A♭/D♭ pole and inverts it to prolong a descending D♭ minor triad, embellished by leaps up to the seventh. 

At this point the initial ascent through the F minor seventh chord is roughly reversed. The original register is reinstated and E♭ falls back to C, which is immediately preceded by the only instance of the subdominant, B♭. Then, as earlier, the second scale degree is expanded, this time as a prolongation of the dominant of the dominant through a step-wise ascent from the lower fifth. Finally, A♭ falls to tonic F to complete the structure in appropriate blues fashion.

While Coltrane's sequence does not by any means possess a typical Schenkerian structure, its voice-leading nonetheless evokes a tonal outline. Rather than construct a step-wise Urlinie, Coltrane stacks thirds in a manner common both in his music and to blues music generally; a central elaboration follows, then a very roughly symmetrical return. (In the graph below, parentheses indicate that the register has been idealized.) 

Coltrane may have been "moving freely" through these transpositions, but the resulting music is hardly "random." The higher-level voice-leading reveals an emergent tonal structure which shows Coltrane's improvisation on A Love Supreme to be as ordered and coherent as his composing. 

Apophatic Music

"Music is a movement of nothing in a space that is nowhere, with a purpose that is no-one's, in which we hear a non-existent feeling the object [and subject*] of which is nobody. And that is the meaning of music." 

Roger Scruton, Perictione in Colophon 

[*added in The Soul of the World]