It may be that the death of the great microtonalist pioneer Ben Johnston has made me more alert to discussions of microtonality but Johnston's death at the start of this week primed me to notice Ethan's writing on Collier's work. Full disclosure, despite the fact that I sang in choirs in high school and college I have always hated, really hated, choral jazz. I am not against choral music with complex harmonies as such, I admire the choral music of Messiaen and Durufle, for instance. I love some choral works by Xenakis for that matter and I gave the Penderecki Lukaspassio score to a relative as a holiday gift a few years ago.
But there's something specifically about choral jazz that I hate for reasons I admit I can't quite articulate. It can be Ella or Frank or Herb Jeffries or Mahalia singing along with Ellington's band and I love that. Choral jazz is like ... all the worst excesses of technocratic post-bop tendencies in jazz combined with treating the human voice like the most impressive thing it can do is imitate broadly instrumental idioms as found in jazz. Maybe the harmonies in choral jazz are lusher than anything you'll find in William Byrd's Mass for 5 voices but Byrd's Mass is the more powerful work for the sheer austerity of the text-setting within the polyphonic style he was working in. Most choral jazz is opulent beyond what I regard as any reasonable approach to text-setting. It really is, as Hein's instincts suggest to him, showing off just to show off. If there's a text-setting based reason for doing something, wonderful. It can even be shlocky or over the top. I like some choral settings of the Psalms by Mendelssohn for instance and like any Romantic era composer he could get over the top.
But, let's get to that link, first.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magical-chords/
There's something he wrote about the one-man band thing that he finds unhealthy. It reminds me, actually, that in classical music there was a one-man band composer, a composer who wrote music wherein after 1933 there was nothing in his symphonic scores he couldn't play himself ... and odds are pretty good only specialists would know or care who Paul Hindemith was. I care because I enjoy a lot of his music but his appeal is very niche!
But at the risk of guessing, there's something that needs to be pointed out about one-man band type composers. Hindemith was a music teacher and he also did some work to pioneer work in what we'd call early music studies and ethnomusicology (he and Bartok tried working together but split over how much to use modern recording tech with Hindemith preferring old transcription methods and Bartok preferring what we now call field recordings ... siding with Bartok personally).
The thing I want to point out about Hindemith is that even though he could play every instrument in the orchestra there was a countervailing passion in his work, he loved writing music for amateurs. He regarded the lifeblood of musical culture to reside in the musical activities of amateurs more than the professional music-makers. His last string quartet he wrote so that his wife, who was learning cello, could play a string quartet with him and two violin students that regularly visited the Hindemith home. So the violin and viola parts are all challenging and the cello part is simple. There's a movement in which there's canon in augmentation so that a viola, say, can play something complex and the cello takes the same melody in canon in augmentation. Hindemith's last string quartet isn't going to be to everyone's liking but I admit I like the work.
Collier's one-man band in the studio approach sounds well-polished but it's studio. What I mean to say is that when someone like Hindemith did the one-person band thing his goal was not that everything musical he wanted to express would only ever have to be played by him, he wrote things with the idea for orchestras and chamber ensembles and straight up amateur musicians could play the works. Stevie Wonder may have been able to play all the tracks on some of his songs but live he plays with a band.
That Stevie Wonder arrangement drives me up the wall. That stuff Collier does reminds me of basically everything I hate about choral jazz. The introduction is already so overloaded with decorative riffs and virtuoso display there's nowhere to go in the arrangement except bigger and lusher chords and more frenetic rhythmic pops and squeaks. Of course he had to make things more complex than Wonder did in the original work.
As for that modulation in "In the Bleak Midwinter". Well, great that Collier has the chops to land on G 1/2 sharp but in choral arranging and choral compositional terms all that saves that from being a cliche is that quarter-tone's difference. It's the kind of cheap gimmick in modulating in choral music that I hate and can just barely put up with even when a genius like Stevie Wonder does it.
It's the bane of jazz choral composers and arrangers that they have to leave nothing that could be thought of as "negative space" unless they're over-emphasizing a passage for the sake of a soloist's virtuosity. I realize I'm ranting a lot against choral jazz here and that there will inevitably be people who disagree me and that's okay for people to disagree with me. I'm explaining how much I hate choral jazz as distinct from basically all other forms of jazz and I want to be clear that I'm writing as someone who loves choral music and grants that jazz and choral music "can" fit together but that it's too fraught with self-aggrandizing displays. There's such a thing as scaling the techniques up or down to the communication of the text you're working with.
There's more I could say ... but I'm going to limit myself a bit.
As microtonal works based on traditional tunes go I'd say the benchmark American works would be Ben Johnston's string quartets Nos. 4 and 5.
String Quartet No. 4 is variations on "Amazing Grace", in which Johnston starts simply and in standard notes but as the variations progress he introduces more complex shifts in tuning systems used within which to write his variations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM
Quartet No. 5 is a variation work on an old folk tune, "Lonsome Valley". The short version for tonight's blog is to just say that Johnston used different tuning systems in his variations of these traditional melodies for expressive purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG4Z8yVEHZI
So ... I'm going to stop here for the time being but I might come back and write more or I may find by tomorrow I've gotten this all out of my system. We'll see.
POSTSCRIPT 10.28pm
In the Stevie Wonder original of "Don't You Worry `Bout a Thing" the bridge has some glorious tightly knit imitative procedures going on in Wonder's vocals. That frankly makes me angry. Collier has shoved a lot of plush jazzy chords and "oo-aaah" stuff and he does so by eliminating one of the things that Wonder's music can be full of, counterpoint. Sure, it's not fugue or invention but there's all kinds of ways to have counterpoint. "Superstition" is full of counterpoint and there's a lot of counterpoint in the best funk and r&b even if it's not using strictly imitative procedures. But that bridge ... Wonder does, in fact, use tight little episodes of imitative counterpoint and Collier ... I hate to write this ... Collier takes that element out of the arrangement he does of the song and as a Wonder fan I ... just can't forgive him for doing that. If you know the track from Innversions I probably don't even have to tell you where the little canonic episodes occur because you've heard the tracks so many times.
So when Hein talks about how Collier is so set on harmonies he leaves out everything else I can tell you exactly what it is in Stevie Wonder's music that got sacrificed on the altar of plush harmonies, Stevie Wonder's counterpoint.
POSTSCRIPT 7-26-2019
I saw some of the comments back and forth and while I would agree that music cognition with respect to rhythm and harmony are activities of the mind I would not suggest that harmony in what's loosely known as classical music is necessarily a result of "Eurocentrism". Harmony as we tend to think of it in Western contexts was almost like a side-effect of polyphonic disciplines emerging from choral music that were refracted through a significant series of evolutionary shifts in tuning systems. That would tend to be "Eurocentric" because it happened in Europe but in terms of the ideological freight that can be associated with such a term I would venture, and this is where having been a choral singer shapes my perspective, the Western harmonic approach has been informed by a thousand years of disciplines related to ensemble vocal singing. We can't even say that, for instance, false relations were "against the rules as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance. We can say that some groups of musicians regarded it as terrible to pepper your music with false relations from Italian schools but Franco-Flemish composers used false relations for quite a while and English composers who emulated the practice of using false relations for dramatic effect during the time of Byrd and Tallis used false-relations with ease. If you want to watch an amusing video explaining that ... go over here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoonFUb5HA
Rotem appears to be a Rick & Morty fan and ... season 4 shows up in November 2019.
So ... I might say that what we tend to think of as harmony in a 19th century pedagogical body of work was "Eurocentric" but I'm a stickler for distinguishing between the entire history of Western musical cultural life and theory on the one hand and the post German idealism ideological strands that informed the Romantic era and played a role in the formulation of art canons on the other. If you try to analyze Byrd's keyboard music on the basis of functional harmony from "common practice" you're going to fail and fail and fail.
It's not for nothing that any number of avant gardists from the last century made a point of going back to essentially pre-major-and-minor-keys music for inspiration.
The more I listened to Collier's work the more I had this strong vibe that it was like he was some mixture of Jason Mraz met Eddie Money met Phil Collins who just ... also happened to pick up the ability to write and sing arrangements that shift from E major to G quarter sharp.
POSTSCRIPT 7-29-2019
Something else has come to mind. One of my favorite composers, Haydn, wrote that he ended up on the Esterhazy estate and he had no one to trouble or vex him and he was forced to become original. Of course Haydn was not referring to being isolated in the sense of not working with a veritable army of musicians, he was talking about not being tied to the hub of musical activity that was the "New York" of his day, Vienna. He was able to develop his unique style because he had a patron who was willing to let Haydn do whatever he wanted, and so Haydn experimented with what audiences liked and what they didn't enjoy he stopped doing. This was not exactly just pandering to the aristocratic patron and his party guests because there were, of course, the musicians who played the music, too. The string quartet of legend was Haydn working with Mozart, Ditters, and Vanhal, all composers who may not be at the same canonical level in composing but became the most legendary early string quartet in the history of the medium.
Something else that comes to mind. Kyle Gann wrote some time back that Haydn and Mozart meeting each other helped them both get out of compositional ruts they had found themselves in. So, pertinent to Hein's comments about the need for collaboration and comparing ideas, if even canonized composers at the level of Mozart and Haydn needed to exchange ideas and draw inspiration from each other then surely the rest of us can follow that example.
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