Unstructured Events Without Goals...with B.B.
Method to Improvise
In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg discovered a new way to look at melody...intervallically.
That means that a note is not just a note, but is related to the previous note and the note that follows, and that its quality is determined, not solely by being itself, but also by being in relation to the other notes around it.
Schoenberg, personally, was rather an angry man and while he could have taken this discovery about intervals and chosen pure and strong, or pretty and sweet, intervals, he choose the most dissonant and difficult ones.
These intervals are called seconds (Secundal harmonies) and the tritone.
The tritone is so disturbing that medieval monks used to call it “The Interval of the Devil”.
But Schoenberg was not satisfied with just being difficult musically.
He also wanted to make sure that all the pretty music that had proceeded him, since a little before J.S. Bach, would be completely absent from his music so he invented a musical system where you had to play all the possible 12 notes in the scale before you could play them again.
That destroyed an organizing principle called “Tonality” that had been around for around 400 years.
For three years of my life I worked in person, on the phone, in the mail, with one of Schoenberg’s students who became even more famous than him. A man named John Cage (See John Cage Stories Tab on this site)
He was even more destructive than Schoenberg and destroyed Schoenberg’s new atonal system and replaced it with absolutely random notes.
After 40 years of thinking about what was important to me, musically, I emerged with those three central ideas: Secundal, random generated, twelve tone row music and for six months I wrote twenty four two minute Dances called the “Anger Dance Suite”.
12 tone music, when it came out 100 years ago, was wildly unpopular.
Besides being so dissonant in its practice that nobody liked it, there was no way that musicians who were not of the most educated elite class of readers could ever begin to approach the music.
But...6 months ago I distilled three simple principles that would make this music approachable to everyone:
1. Learn six of the Themes presented in The Anger Dance Suite. Each phrase is only 12 notes long so this is not impossible. As the pitch order is what is important you now have six musical expressions that are very flexible rhythmically.
2. Riffs are short repeated patterns, so take any two notes from one of Themes phrases and repeat them in a rhythmically memorable way, four times, and you have created a riff.
3. Runs are a series of notes, typically played quickly, that are played once to connect two different ideas. In this case you are simply connecting the Themes to the riffs. The underlying scale used in this music is the chromatic scale, in all its various forms. Speed techniques are important in this music because it is impossible to play Themes with their huge melodic leaps very quickly. Without some resource to play fast the music becomes static and loses interest rhythmically quickly. Hence, fast, slurred chromatic scales are useful as ornaments.
To improvise with this music you simply combine these three ideas in any order.
Understanding these three ideas also makes listening to this discordant music completely comprehensible because the soloist is always doing one of these three simple things.
Rhythms in 12 Tone Music
In the early 1980s I was running the very first rock ‘n’ roll school in America…The Atlanta School of Rock.
I was also leading a three piece Chicago Blues group with two African-American men and a drum machine that Prince had made popular at the time.
I played Schoenberg for the lead singer one night. He said simply “Neurotic white man music”.
This was 40 years before “Black lives matter”, but his point was well taken.
12 tone music’s weakness is its rhythm.
Listen to Schoenberg’s Op. 25 solo piano piece, one of the most famous of 12 tone pieces played by Glenn Gould,
Even in the hands of this genius the music sounds like a score to a horror film. In less capable hands, it sounds even worse.
To solve this musical problem I have put these six atonal themes in clearly discernible rhythms.
This infuses the music with a physicality, vivacity and a sensuality that makes the music more openly invitational to listeners.
Unstructured Events Without Goals...with B.B.
The 24 Dances in the “Anger Dance Suite” are either 52% improvisational or 62.5% improvisational depending on the length of the Theme.
This open musical space fulfills a living goal of living “ Unstructured Events, Without Goals “.
I am an improviser and I needed someone to play the new piece with me.
I tried out 16 different people including four double bass players, a pianist, three flautists, an oboist, two percussionists and five vocalists.
But, the right person for the job was a bass trombonist named Scott Sterling, who we renamed B.B., to whom I dedicated "The Anger Dance Suite", Opus 1.
As of this writing June 2, 2021 we have had thirteen rehearsals and each week we learn one of the twenty four dances from the Anger Suite.
This site video-documents our progress...