I am always surprised when very good amateur classical musicians (not guitarists, of course) tell me they don't know anything about harmony. Why weren't they ever taught? Weren't they curious enough to learn?
You can know how to play a classical piece very well without analyzing its harmonic structure, though you can play it a lot better if you do hear and understand the way it moves from tonality to tonality. But knowing just the melody of a jazz standard is barely knowing it at all.
Typically, a written piece of classical music tells you exactly what note to play, how fast to play it, how to articulate it, and how loud it should be. All these precise directives still leave a lot of room for interpretation. The classical musician is not a robot producing sounds dictated by the marks on the page in front of her. But the ideal remains of playing the piece the way the composer wanted it to be played.
Typically when a jazz musician has sheet music in front of her, all she sees is a melody line and some chords written as letters (e.g. C7, G-7b5). The harmonic instruments - piano, bass, and guitar - have to figure out how to play those chords, and the melodic instruments have to improvise in a way that fits over them. No two jazz pianists, given the same series of letters representing chords, would play them exactly the same way. Not only that, they have freedom to substitute chords that can have a similar harmonic function. I found a good article on this stuff in Wikipedia.
When I was working on jazz, I got to the stage where I could look at letters standing for chords and play stuff that fit, and I could also transpose to the right key for the kind of saxophone I was playing (C major concert is D major on a tenor sax, for example). I also got to the stage where I had learned the melodies of a good number of songs by heart. However, I never pushed myself past that stage, to memorizing (and hearing) the underlying harmonies of a song.
Recently I found way of doing that by combining that exercise with another musical goal: improving my sound. I'm gradually learning the harmonies of the great jazz standard, All the Things You Are, by Jerome Kern. I'm using the notes of the harmonies as long tones to warm up on the flute, first playing the bass notes (F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, G, C... etc.). I've almost learned the progression well enough that I can go through it without stopping to think. Then I build on it by playing the first two notes in the chord (F-Ab, Bb-Db, Ab-C ... etc.), then the triad, then the seventh, etc. etc.
I'm doing something very similar with rhythm changes, the chord progression underlying Gershwin's I Got Rhythm.
Warming up on the flute or another melodic instrument this way makes more sense than just playing a series of long tones, because the notes you play have musical meaning as a sequence. For the same reason, sometimes I take a piece by Bach or Telemann and play it very slowly, concentrating on the quality of my sound, but still brought forward by musical logic and not anything mechanical.
You can know how to play a classical piece very well without analyzing its harmonic structure, though you can play it a lot better if you do hear and understand the way it moves from tonality to tonality. But knowing just the melody of a jazz standard is barely knowing it at all.
Typically, a written piece of classical music tells you exactly what note to play, how fast to play it, how to articulate it, and how loud it should be. All these precise directives still leave a lot of room for interpretation. The classical musician is not a robot producing sounds dictated by the marks on the page in front of her. But the ideal remains of playing the piece the way the composer wanted it to be played.
Typically when a jazz musician has sheet music in front of her, all she sees is a melody line and some chords written as letters (e.g. C7, G-7b5). The harmonic instruments - piano, bass, and guitar - have to figure out how to play those chords, and the melodic instruments have to improvise in a way that fits over them. No two jazz pianists, given the same series of letters representing chords, would play them exactly the same way. Not only that, they have freedom to substitute chords that can have a similar harmonic function. I found a good article on this stuff in Wikipedia.
When I was working on jazz, I got to the stage where I could look at letters standing for chords and play stuff that fit, and I could also transpose to the right key for the kind of saxophone I was playing (C major concert is D major on a tenor sax, for example). I also got to the stage where I had learned the melodies of a good number of songs by heart. However, I never pushed myself past that stage, to memorizing (and hearing) the underlying harmonies of a song.
Recently I found way of doing that by combining that exercise with another musical goal: improving my sound. I'm gradually learning the harmonies of the great jazz standard, All the Things You Are, by Jerome Kern. I'm using the notes of the harmonies as long tones to warm up on the flute, first playing the bass notes (F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, G, C... etc.). I've almost learned the progression well enough that I can go through it without stopping to think. Then I build on it by playing the first two notes in the chord (F-Ab, Bb-Db, Ab-C ... etc.), then the triad, then the seventh, etc. etc.
I'm doing something very similar with rhythm changes, the chord progression underlying Gershwin's I Got Rhythm.
Warming up on the flute or another melodic instrument this way makes more sense than just playing a series of long tones, because the notes you play have musical meaning as a sequence. For the same reason, sometimes I take a piece by Bach or Telemann and play it very slowly, concentrating on the quality of my sound, but still brought forward by musical logic and not anything mechanical.
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