My online jazz composition course has come to an end, leaving me feeling rather bereft – I really didn’t expect that I would respond so enthusiastically to being given homework, and if I’ve learnt anything from the experience it’s the importance of structure and direction, as well as the right balance between openness and clear limits. Plus, a reminder of how much students hate any sort of peer review or assessment – I was the only person to comment on other students’ compositions as we’d been told, and that was with massive trepidation and because I like the online discussion. Looking ahead to next term, it’s really important to get students interacting with one another rather than just doing the ping-pong thing with me (someone makes a point to me, I respond, someone else responds to the original point by addressing me, and so on), and this is a reminder that I need to do a lot more than simply ask people to do this.
Oh, and I did learn some useful things about jazz composition, including a real breakthrough in understanding modal approaches. It’s interesting that I seem to be finding it relatively easy to come up not just with melodies but with harmonic structures, when my brain continues to refuse to string sentences together except under protest; probably, as my wife suggests, it’s because I don’t have anything at stake in it and so there’s no fear involved, whereas research and academic writing are currently all about anxiety and insecurity. Yes, I might get some pushback from reducing the glorious blues and rhythm heritage of jazz, the wonders of improvisation and interaction and spontaneity, to rather chilly, abstract, ECM-lite sketches – but to be fair this is partly a product of (1) still getting the hang of the technology and (2) not actually being able to play with other people at the moment, and in any case my stuff is always going to be judged in terms of a dog walking on its hind legs.
So, having now expanded one of my 8-bar exercises into something a bit more substantial – and which I could imagine being played properly with a bigger range of instruments – I’ve taken the plunge of making it publicly available…
Sphinx 
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