Sphinx

I am trying – and so far failing, but there is a vague hope that working through the ideas by writing about them might help – to think of helpful analogies for contemporary big band composition and arrangement. Over the last few years, I’ve happily drawn lessons and ideas from my musical hobby to help think about different aspects of teaching, writing and research, so there must be at least a possibility that the reverse process might also work. I must stress the helpful aspect; I can think of plenty of possible analogies, but they don’t do anything to suggest a way forward.

Context: this is what my jazz composition course is focusing on this term. More specific context: I spent a fair amount of time over the holidays obsessively fiddling with four- and five-part harmonies, to arrange a couple of my own compositions for jazz orchestra, as had been suggested – perhaps, in retrospect, not entirely seriously, as no one else in the class bothered – and I was reasonably pleased with the results, for a first attempt. First class of the new term, and the tutor airily remarks (not, I should say, about my efforts, but in general terms) that all the stuff about close-harmonised sax and trumpet sections and call-and-response and soli and shout choruses and the rest is how this was done back in the fifties, but contemporary approaches are quite different.

Okay. Part of the problem is that this stuff is what all the books talk about – it’s not that they teach you only to produce Count Basie imitations, but they present innovation as residing in the composition and harmonisation – different chord structures and tone clusters etc – not in… well, part of the problem is that I’m not entirely sure what else we’re talking about, but it seems to involve much less harmonisation, and having more instruments play on their own rather than as a section, and less explicit countermelodies. Which to me then rather begs the question of why you’d want to bother with a jazz orchestra in the first place, when you can get a rich and complex sound and texture from a sextet or septet. It’s not that I’m quite signing up to a philosophy of ‘if I’ve got fourteen horns I’m going to damn well use them’ – but basically that. I mean, doesn’t everyone just get bored if they don’t get to play much?

Among the issues is the fact that I don’t listen to a lot of big band or jazz orchestra music – certainly not contemporary examples. It’s just not particularly my thing; it often feels too old-fashioned, or too cluttered – or it’s just a background for a star soloist to show off against, trying to be the new Miles’n’Gil, which doesn’t appeal at all. And so the answer to all this may simply be: why try to do stuff you don’t understand and don’t have any feel for? But, apart from the fact that this is the subject matter of a course I’ve already paid for, it feels like an interesting challenge, if only I can get some idea of what it is that I’m not getting.

Maybe this is – starts groping for academic analogies – a bit like my early encounters with the American Political Science Association conference when I began my explorations of Thucydides reception; initially baffling and alienating, as apparently familiar things appeared in strange and confusing new contexts and combinations, but with further experience and study it started to make sense, and while I will never be a proper political theorist it has enriched my own approach, and I do now have a much better idea what’s going on. So, a matter of gaining experience, and in the very unlikely event that any readers of this blog are aficionados of contemporary jazz orchestration, I’d be very grateful for recommendations of stuff to listen to, ideally with some indication of what makes it contemporary and good.

But I can’t help feeling that this is not the right analogy – this is like introducing a bebop fan to the avant-garde of the 1960s, where you’re talking about different approaches (even if radically different ones) to the same basic enterprise of a small group of musicians creating music together. Big band composition/arrangement feels like a wholly different thing altogether [unison: “a wholly different thing”. Yes, this entire blog post is an excuse for an Airplane reference]; not a political theory paper or article compared with an ancient history paper or article, but something that is not a paper or article at all.

And that is where I’m stuck; I don’t know what it is like. The fact that it involves a lot of people is clearly important – creating both possibilities (but for what?) and problems (rather more obvious). Is this like organising a research workshop or conference? Not really – that’s about a selection of guest soloists, so to speak, and the performance of the whole is left entirely to chance, apart from making sure that the coffee arrives on time. Yes, I can see how my organisational philosophy – create a flexible structure within which random new things can happen – might usefully transfer over, but, at least for the purposes of this course and its homework exercises, jazz orchestration surely involves a great deal more, well, orchestration.

The other thing that occurred to me – and this might explain why I’m finding this whole thing rather stressful – is that perhaps the better analogy, given the need to try to get a bunch of disparate personalities with different skills and interests to work together for collective goals, is running an academic department. There’s the need to distribute tasks, to make sure they get done, balancing aptitude and fairness; there’s the need to stop people treading on one another’s toes, to produce a teaching programme that actually hangs together rather than simply reflecting individual preferences. And that’s before we start thinking about the financial aspects. Is the contemporary big band idiom primarily a response to marketisation and the forces of late capitalism?

Hmm. Didn’t like being head of department, bad for my health, not inclined to do it again if I can help it. Not sure whether musicians are easier to manage than academics. Maybe I can come up with a Thucydides analogy instead…