Ethan Hein discusses Thelonious Monk's Bemsha Swing

Happy Thanksgiving. One of the things I'm thankful for this day is for the music of Thelonious Monk and that Ethan Hein discussed another one of Monk's pieces. :)

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/bemsha-swing/

I might have to write more at this spot after holiday festivities but for the time being enjoy Ethan's discussion of this wonderful piece. 

November 24, 2023 4:30pm 

My own approach to this musical gem is, perhaps ironically, to jettison any discussion of harmony except as background for the linear writing.  Yes, we're totally looking at two-thirds of a twelve-bar blues that recursively turns around on itself ad infinitum.  If we don't know about what a twelve-bar blues is supposed to sound like do we even hear the relentless momentum that tacit expectation creates?  I'm going to say probably not.  

For those of us who know "Bemsha Swing" leverages the expectation of a 12-bar blues that is never released this overt manipulation of a conventional expectation is what gives the song its relentless drive.  For people whose musical experience doesn't draw from either jazz or blues they can't hear an expectation subverted that they don't know about to begin with.  Thus music education is immensely valuable for understanding what Monk has done in this song.  

Granting that, I did say I was going to discuss Monk's linear writing.  Because this piece is so short I've taken the liberty of borrowing Ethan Hein's score to highlight the places where Monk uses chains of oblique, contrary and similar motion in the two voices in the score to create compelling counterpoint.  The voice-leading in this song is as solid as granite.  

In "traditional" contrapuntal studies you'll be told that it's dangerous to rely on too much of one kind of motion, especially similar motion, when you're writing out two voices.  It is best to switch things up between oblique, similar and contrary motion.   Since, if I recall correctly, Ethan has discussed the distinctions between these forms of motion I don't want to belabor terms.  Instead I want to highlight Monk's elegant shifting back and forth from oblique to contrary to similar motion within his four-measure phrases and how he uses contrary motion out to multi-octave strong beat arrivals at the start of each of his four-measure phrases on the roots of his core harmonies.

PHRASE 1 (I)

measures 1-4, measure by measure 

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 4 to 5 contrary motion outward to two-octave interval on tonic

PHRASE 2 (I)

measures 5-8, measure by measure

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 8 to 9 contrary motion from upper C natural and lower G flat to four-octave interval on subdominant

PHRASE 3 (IV)

measures 9 to 12, measure by measure

oblique, similar, similar, oblique

from measure 12 to 13 contrary motion from upper G natural and lower D flat outward to two-octave interval on C, the tonic

PHRASE 4 (I)

measures 13-16, measure by measure

oblique, contrary, similar/contrary

Of course you shouldn't just take my word for it. I should show you what I mean.  

A point of clarification for how and why I have designated certain measures as having oblique motion is in order. The G naturals on the second half of the fourth beat of each measure of 4/4 are so metrically weak they function as anacruses. In other words, for harmonic/linear considerations we could cut them out altogether and they don't change the overall linear progression of the two voices.  Thus from measures 1 to 2 in Phrase 1 I consider the movement to be oblique.  The C natural stays where it is while the bass voice descends from C down to A natural and reaches A flat by descent at measure 2. If you fixate on that G in the treble clef at the end of measure 1 and try to think of it as a harmony or as a metrically significant tone you'll get thrown off.  Think of it this way, if you literally don't play that G on the last eighth of measure 1 does the harmony change?  No.  Now melodically it's a necessary part of the song. as it reaffirms the rising perfect fourth interval that permeates the melody and is reinforced by the I-IV harmonies.

What makes Monk's linear writing so great is that within each phrase he continuously cycles through varied forms of motion but at each "arrival point", the transition from a measure 4 to a measure 5 or the transition from a measure 8 to a measure 9 he uses contrary motion to hit octaves on the roots of the core harmony of each phrase, the proverbial I and IV in the two-thirds blues turnaround.  Across the phrases he uses a sequence of oblique then contrary then similar the oblique to contrary motion for his tonic phrases.  He uses oblique to similar to oblique motion in his subdominant phrase and uses contrary motion to shift from Phrase 3 to Phrase 4, with Phrase 3 recapitulating the oblique to contrary to similar to contrary sequence of forms of motion.  

The reason you can go with the barest of bare bones harmony of spiral out into more complex options in "Bemsha Swing" is because Monk's linear writing is so immaculate the song is indestructibly great as long as you respect the melody and the bass line as the foundation for whatever it is you want to do.  As Ethan pointed out, there's also the fact that the head tune lends itself so beautifully to imitative procedures.  A melody that can be played against itself with a measure's separation (or two) is, colloquially speaking, the apotheosis of good contrapuntal writing.  Having said that, here's an annotated image of the score to show Monk's linear writing you can find at Ethan Hein's original post. Thanks to Ethan for writing about Monk again.  

Dusan Bogdanovic "Roundabout (Variations on `Round Midnight' by Thelonious Monk" for guitar and string quartet

 I know Bogdanovic has experimented over the last forty to fifty years with fusions of classical guitar and jazz but I did not know until this week he'd composed a quintet for guitar and string quartet on a theme by Thelonious Monk.  So here you go.

musicians are:

Benjamin Schmid,violin Kirill Kobantschenko,violin Benedict Mitterbauer,viola Florian Eggner,cello Edin Karamazov,guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m95YOZ8R73U

movements are listed as follows:

00:00-02:36 1.Introduction 02:37-05:47 2.Prelude and Fugue 05:48-08:31 3.Nocturne 08:32-09:53 4.Scherzo improvisando 09:54-12:14 5. Danse 12:15-14:00 6.Ricercare 14:01-16:07 7.epilogue

Clearly we're listening to a set of variations where the core musical material is filtered through forms and character variations rather than the continuous variation form that tends to be the default in jazz. So think more "Goldberg Variations" or "Diabelli variations" than one long continuous jam.

It would take a formidable jazz band to go sixteen continuous minutes on just a single song. One of the things I've suggested here at my blog is that one of the challenges for jazz after more than a century is a cultural default to continuous variation form. Jazz composers have somewhat broken out of the confines of continuous variation but with mixed results. I think Wynton Marsalis' violin concerto written for Benedetti actually works. It's never going to be my favorite violin concerto but I liked it enough to listen to it a few times when it got released a few years ago. I'm not sure I'd go back to it like George Russell's Living Time but that's a different kind of musical thing and Russell revisited that work almost from the ground up later.

I think for we guitarists in the early 21st century variation form has its own separate set of challenges because while Ponce's "variations and fugue on La Folia" is cemented in the repertoire it takes a fantastic guitarist to make the work compelling for me (Marcin Dylla, for instance). For me there are too many firm cadences across each of the variations for it to win me over most of the time. Besides, given my historic sympathies for Bream repertoire I'm not sure any guitarist composers can top Benjamin Britten's reverse-variations/cumulative setting approach to variations in Nocturnal after John Dowland.

But I love the idea of a multi-movement chamber work including classical guitar based on a theme by Thelonious Monk. I would be inclined toward a sonata form using two different Monk themes as a first movement and then probably a cumulative form fugue derived from mutated elements of another Monk standard to get a sonata-prelude and fugue work because I love playing with sonata forms and fugues. Counterpoint inspires me. Your mileage may vary. I think when it comes to syntheses of classical music and jazz traditions we're collectively only just getting started. There have been a lot of failures that in some way or another fall between two stools, but the musical path seems worth pursuing.

I've made no secret I'm interested in developing practical and theoretical approaches that can span the often scholastically constructed gaps between forms, styles and vocabularies. If there are "enemies" (and I hate to have to put it this way) they are not among musicians trading ideas and experimenting, but ideologues who are style purists, genre purists, or formal purists who don't want their "real" music sullied by impurities from fusions. Many fusions have stunk, there's no denying it, but I think in the last half century Dusan Bogdanovic is one of he guitarist composers whose work offers very promising steps toward jazz/classical guitar synthesis. Some pieces I like more than others but he's always been an intriguing and inspiring composer to me.

POSTSCRIPT 4-15-2023

I've been thinking about this piece a bit and I think that while I like the idea of a set of character variations in multiple movements there's something I miss from Monk's song as performed in the jazz tradition. To use a term Ethan Hein has used, there are fun character moments but none of the movements is long enough for a listener to really savor the groove in each movement. In jazz we usually get the head theme, jamming variations and the reprise. Bogdanovic did a good job of exploring contrapuntal and harmonic possibilities dormant in Monk's tune but I personally feel as though four longer movements getting to sixteen minutes would give listeners more room to savor the grooves of different variations than seven smaller movements. I love the idea of a fugue based on a Monk theme but I wanted that fugue to have been longer. I also lean toward cumulative form. I mean, a fugue based on an inversion of the incipit of "Let's Cool One" that slowly built up to the arrival of the entirety of "Let's Cool One" as Monk played it would be more what I would want to do, speaking just for myself. The thing Charles Ives used to do was write complex fantasias where he'd have countermelodies to distorted forms of well-known American popular songs and he'd only reveal that all his musical material was building up toward the presentation of that pop song at the end. I think something like that would be fun to do with Monk.

Or, alternately, just building an entire fugue on the melody of Stevie Wonder's "Ordinary Pain" would be a dream come true. But I digress. I get to at my blog.

Ethan Hein on two classic tunes by Thelonious Monk: "Straight, No Chaser" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/straight-no-chaser/

Since I am a Monk fan I could not resist linking to some of Ethan Hein's recent blogging. Since he chose two of my favorite Monk tunes I kinda have to write something. :)