Knowing about Harmony and Hearing It

I never developed a good ear for harmony, and it makes me an insecure improvisor in jazz. I tried to make up for that weakness by taking 3 years of musicology courses at the Hebrew University several years ago. I actually did pretty well in the counterpoint classes, but I was a weak student of harmony. The final year in the harmony series was a class in analysis of music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker, whose approach reduces music of the classical period to a descent from the dominant to the tonic, to simplify a complex, sophisticated, and valuable approach.
I didn't enjoy learning the Schenker system, mainly because it didn't seem to me to speak to what is original and creative in music (or the other arts). But I have found that my studies of harmony have helped me understand what's going on in the jazz standards that I try to learn and improvise on. If I look at the chord progressions and see how they work, I can also hear them a bit better.
It's interesting to me that Western classical music more or less broke with classical harmony in the 2nd half of the 19th century, but Western popular music, the songs that so much jazz is based on, continued in the tradition and developed it. They continue to speak in the language of Western harmony, which, I think is what Schenker is really about.

To take an analogy, if you study English literature, you'll find that it's based on sentences, almost all of which have subjects, verbs, and indirect or direct objects. Clearly this isn't something that writers made up. So if Western music in the harmonic tradition moves from the dominant to the tonic, as Schenker and his followers among the musicologists showed in their analyses, maybe that isn't a matter of the composer's choice, but rather of the grammar of harmonic music.
Take a look at the chord progression in the A part of John Lewis' "Afternoon in Paris": CM7 | C-7 - F7 | Bb M7 | Bb-7 - Eb7 | Ab M7 | D-7- G7b9 | CM7 - A-7 | D-7 - G7.
Mainly it's the cycle of fifths, from C down to Ab, but then, instead of continuing to Db, the Ab becomes the flat two of G, leading to G7, and back to C, with a turnaround bringing us back to the starting point.
This was a clever move on Lewis' part, and there are a lot of other very clever things about this piece, one of which being that the melody moves from high G to an octave below it, although it's in the key of C (Schenker would say that it should resolve on a C, but Lewis wanted the off-balance feeling of ending on the dominant).
If I hadn't taken the classes in harmony, I wouldn't have been able to understand what Lewis did. The next step is to sit at the piano, play the chords, see how the voice-leading brings them from one to another, and learn how to hear them. Will I have the patience to do that? Tune in next week.

So What Else is New?

In last Friday's (Hebrew) edition of the magazine section of Haaretz, Doron Halutz interviewed Eitan Y. Wilf, a lecturer in anthropology at the Hebrew University, about his book, School for Cool, which is about the supposed dilemma of teaching jazz in conservatories. I say "supposed" dilemma, because I don't think it's very different from teaching painting, drama, creative writing, or cinema in academic programs. Mastery of all these creative arts was once acquired informally, by apprenticeship, and, by making academic disciplines of them, they have become bureaucratized and standardized. It is claimed that the graduates of jazz programs in conservatories all play pretty much the same way, and they are not as creative as the musicians of earlier generations, who learned by acquiring mentors, by taking the risk of playing in jam sessions, by getting jobs in semi-professional bands and moving up to better and better ensembles.
I'm suspicious of that claim because there were thousands of professional musicians in bands during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of them were fairly unmemorable. The great musicians, who played in famous bands, were the best of the best, and it's not to be expected that jazz programs at conservatories should turn out dozens of players like Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, or Lester Young. The jazz scene only turned out one of each.
Still, there is a connection between what is taught and the way it is taught. Jazz today is not what it was fifty years ago, because, as Wilf mentioned in the interview, though the interviewer didn't pick up on it, it is no longer played in night clubs by black male heroin addicts and white male heroin addicts who aspired to be black (to put it overly bluntly).
Incidentally, in his book, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux points out that for black Americans, a career in music was a step up in the socio-economic ladder from the jobs then available to black males, whereas for white musicians, it was either a step down or a step to the side, into Bohemia.
If a young person wants to learn how to play jazz today, he or she can't hang around clubs where jazz is played and listen and try to squeeze in, because there are very few clubs where jazz is played. Aspiring musicians congregate in conservatories today, and that's where they learn from each other and from older musicians.
I had the good fortune to study music informally with Arnie Lawrence, one of the last musicians who learned his art the old way, from mentors, and from brashly taking the risk of playing wherever and whenever he could. Arnie tried very hard to create a jazz scene in New York, where he was among the founders of the jazz program at the New School, one of the institutions that Wilf studied. But jazz just doesn't have the commercial appeal needed for a "scene."
Incidentally (again) I kind of wonder why the thousands of young musicians who have learned to play jazz in the past twenty or thirty years, because they loved the music, haven't managed to create a commercial basis for the music.
There's still a lot of interest in jazz, and a lot of musicians still love to play it, which is a guarantee of its survival. Today jazz is an international music and, in a sense, a classical music. In part that's because it's become academic, and in part it's because of the efforts of musicians like Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who wanted to take jazz out of the world of night clubs and situate it in concert halls, to make it "respectable."

Cathexis

In the old psychoanalytical jargon, that Greek term meant investing emotion in an object or person. I imagine it's not much used currently, but it's perfectly appropriate to the feelings that artists have about their material and equipment. Photographers love a certain camera, cooks love a certain pan, and musicians love their instruments.
When I open my flute case or saxophone case, I feel a surge of cathexis. I cherish my instruments. Recently I was having setup trouble with my baritone saxophone. I was using a Berg Larsen mouthpiece that I like, and Berg Larsen mouthpieces are definitely among the cooler mouthpieces to be using, but I was having trouble finding the right reeds for it.
Like most people who have been playing sax or clarinet for a while, I have built up a collection of mouthpieces, always seeking the one that will make my playing sound best, and I've had the Berg Larsen mouthpiece for a while. But I have also been using a few other ones, including a metal Bari mouthpiece, that I can't control, but which I keep trying, hoping that I can make it work, because there's something promising about it. It gives me a very live tone, but I can't play consistently on it in all the registers of the instrument. I keep thinking that my embouchure and breathing will mature, and then I'll be able to use that mouthpiece, but it hasn't happened, and, realistically, I doubt that it will.
Among my mouthpieces is a Hite, which has always played nicely for me, but which, somehow, I have never felt cathexis for. Yet the other day I tried it again, having given up on the Berg Larsen for a while, and it played the best of all with the reeds I have. So, why don't I love that mouthpiece the way I love my baritone saxophone?
I don't know. But cathexis or not, I keep coming back to that mouthpiece, so I'll stick with it and learn to love it.