Correction to the video: A few comments have pointed out that Art Tatum did not write Yesterdays, but rather Jerome Kern. In my defence, I don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz standards, but I thank my subscribers for bringing it to my attention. But here's an interesting philosophical question. Seeing as Art Tatum added so much of his own uniqueness and technique to his version of Yesterdays; at which point does a reworking of a jazz standard become its own thing, or something that wholly belongs to the jazz composer or jazz musician? We give composers credit for each version of the Folia they wrote, but at times jazz musicians do a lot more with standards than some composers did with the Folia. Just a thought, from a classical music point of view.
Love the vid btw wonder if you would talk more about the (E.u.r. o. p.e.a.n.)(i.n.t. e. l .l.e .c. t .u .a.l.)(E.l.i. t.e .z.) that gave modernism a false legitimacy.
There is every reason to primarily credit Tatum imo when the tune is just a vessel by that point. Like to the degree that Brahms' Paganini Variations is Brahms, basically anything Tatum did is Tatum. I just listened to his 1953 Somewhere over the Rainbow again and I'm just awestruck with the devices and variations. There are times where you gotta challenge your ear to keep the tune playing because Tatum will go in and out seamlessly.
I am an amateur jazz musician who recently attempting classical composition seriously. Let me shed some light on the question. Legally speaking, this is why we have contrafacts. Sometimes, jazz musicians (most notably Charlie Parker) just want to improvise over existing progressions. The original theme and other elements aren't important to them. One of the most, if not the most significant basis for countless contrafacts is the rhythm changes from Gershwin's I Got Rhythm. Jazz musicians would create new melodies over existing chord progressions to avoid copyright issues in composition, performance and recording. That being said, many tunes in the Great American Songbook are old enough to be in public domain. Musicians should have no worry recording All The Things You Are without making a contrafact out of it. Musically speaking, tunes from the American Songbook are well-crafted. Though not all theme and progressions are innovative, they definitely sound good and can elicit emotional response when you listen to a good performance of them. A jazz musician would then be inspired to learn the tunes and have their own take on them (that's basically how jazz was passed on as it was largely an aural tradition). The inspiration could come from the main theme, the progression or even extra-musical elements like the lyrics or related life experience. In this sense, the musician is still interpreting the tune, no matter how he/she has reworked it. Not to mention good jazz musicians respect traditions and all the greats that come before them. Sometimes, you even find covers where the main theme is completely absent or unrecognizable. But the musicians still use the original titles anyway, Eric Dolphy's interpretation of God Bless The Child from the album The Illinois Concert (absolutely stunning bass clarinet solo, highly recommended). If one recorded All The Things You Are, with the main theme present, but labelled it as something else, I am pretty sure he/she would be destined to be frowned upon by the jazz community.
Absolutely fantastic video. Barry Harris considered jazz music the 'next step' of classical music, and I've always tended to agree. Joe Hisashi's music with Studio Ghibli is another great example of jazz and classical languages fusing together, and that music is basically universally beloved. It feels very modern and also tangibly connected to music history. Anyways, again, great video!
Big agree with 8bit here. Contemporary Japanese music integrated jazz in a very unique way. As a result, in these orchestral media music contexts, Japanese composers have made very compelling music the integrates elements from both schools.
As an aspiring composer myself, I find the idea of combining jazz and classical to be an extremely alluring prospect. In my opinion, the classical world’s rejection of jazz is the leading factor as to why modern classical repertoire holds less than a fraction of the cultural relevance it did 100 years ago. I would be absolutely thrilled if you went into further detail on this subject in future videos; it’s a captivating topic.
The other thing is, composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. are held up as being almost gods so suppose you wrote "Caleb Williams Symphony 1". Even if they don't say it out loud, they will think "Beethoven's Fifth is a guaranteed ticket seller whereas nobody knows this Caleb Williams guy". Especially since each of the members of the symphony orchestra needs to be paid, hiring a symphony orchestra will be very expensive. Modern music software is really going to be the difference for us music composers who don't have millions of dollars. I'm also finding that "experts" who have opinions on how your composition can be better, don't always have views I agree with. I try it their way and I don't end up with anything that's better, so I just go back to what I like.
You only have to look at Mozart to see potential in Jazz harmony fusing with Classical. Mozart does 2 things almost all the time that are incredibly like Jazz music. He'll often on the V chord in say C major, play the notes G and F in the left hand and then play B and E in the right hand. That's pretty much exactly a G13 chord (although the resolution of notes is much more strict and formulaic) He'll also often plays a D# over a C major chord to then resolve it up to an E and this exactly the same blues-original idea in jazz of a minor third resolving up to a major third. In Beethoven's 5th during the development section, he's briefly playing in F minor, and holding a pedal C note in the horn, he plays a neopolitan 6th chord whilst it's happening. So in modern jazz parlance, hearing it in isolation, it's a Gb add#4 (no 7 so it's not a #11), which is incredibly modern and film like in it's colour Even Chopin's harmony is ridiculously Jazz-like in places. Loads of extended harmonies, chromatic plaining of chords, even in his Opus 10 Etude no.1 it has, what we would refer to as, tritone subs. And let's not get into Bach's harmony! We'll be here all day.
So true. Bach's influence can be seen everywhere in jazz. And many contemporary jazz greats, particularly pianists, are classically trained when they were young, e.g. Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, etc. They all take inspirations from classical music and fuse them into jazz. It's really odd to see rejection of jazz in the classical community while the jazz community being completely open to and actually embrace classical.
Beethoven even could be taken as the inventor of Boogie-Woogie. In his last piano sonata, he has a set of variations on a theme, one of which straight sounds like a Boogie-Woogie if played at a fast pace. Only the harmonies still stay within the Classical-Romantic framework, but still it feels not like a long way to go to get to Jazz.
That is not jazz but common harmonic practices. 99% of what people call jazz harmony is just common harmony that has been used since bach, the only difference is that jazz just hammers the same Harmonic cliches to death over and over, wich is something bach would never do because he would have most likely thought that was stupid.
Los mismos acordes puedes encontrarlos en cualquier genero musical. Esos no son acordes jazz por favor. El jazz es básicamente un ejercicio de improvisación que puede ser más o menos complejo, y puede abarcar todo tipo de estilos musicales. La improvisación puede ser una fase de tantas dentro del proceso de composición de una pieza musical. Lo que es evidente es que al jazz se le dió un carácter religioso en determinado momento quizás para vender más o a saber.
10:18 That's exactly how I feel about (as someone who's more familiar with classical music). As much as I want to appreciate and enjoy jazz more, its "grammar" is different and incomprehensible to me. With classical music, I know what to expect. The well-established forms and structures (be it a sonata form, munet and trio, a suite, etc.) help me understand even unfamiliar pieces. When I listen to jazz, I am captivated and dazzled by the seemingly superhuman abilities to riff and improvise on the spot, but at the same time, at any given time I can't tell if we're in the beginning, middle, or end of a jazz piece because I don't understand its structure. I'm not saying this is bad and jazz has to change or anything like that. I'm just saying it becomes a barrier of entry for a novice like me. Thank you for the wonderful video.
The problem with saying that is that jazz 100% has structure, often influenced by classical music. It is very easy to tell where a jazz piece is going and what to expect. You just have to listen to it more to know where exactly you are. For me, it's the same with Classical, I have no idea where where the music is in the form when I am listening to it, and I don't know what to expect. In jazz, the whole point of improvising is make it sound like you're NOT improvising
Yeah I can identify with this. I think that if somebody took jazz and gave it some more structure, that could be really interesting. So instead of having a looping melody with a couple variations that are improvised over, add some explicit A,B,C sections and improvise over each of them. This could give the listener a real "how are they going to map this improvised idea over the next section" kind of anticipation
I’m glad it’s becoming normal to take atonalism for “a phase” (possibly even the thing that justifiably most harmed concert-going) rather than the “inevitable final stage of elevated, educated music.” It’s a fulfilling conclusion that the renewal of classical music was instead back in its origins, folk music. This reminds me a lot of Scruton’s writing on the tonal/atonal subject. If you haven’t read it already, you might be interested in this beautiful chapter he wrote, about what he believed was Adorno’s confusion, while offering folk music as the path forward for the classical world, emphasizing jazz and Slavic music examples as far as I can remember. I don’t recall him calling for an embrace in the sense you talked about, but he did argue for the valuing of jazz and other American genres, as opposed to the demeaning of them.
Even though I studied Jazz piano I always play Bach every day and I realized all the harmonic devices used in jazz are already in Bach's music, all that's happened is that they are presented in a different format that is all, for instance I play Bach's Allemande from the French suit in E flat major every day as a warm up exercise which contains arpeggios and melodic lines that are made up from major sevenths, minor sevenths, dominant sevenths diminished and augmented chords just to name a few it's a fantastic piece of music to learn by heart especially if you want to be able to improvise and play Jazz standards like Round Midnight, Over the Rainbow, or Smoke gets in your eyes, which is what's happened to the majority composers and musicians whether they be classical or jazz, smoke has got in their eyes and cotton wool in their ears.
Jazz it's improvised classical music. Musically it has 90% European influences and 10% African and other world influences. Those 10% are the reason classical instituitons didn't embrace jazz.
For me, Kapustin's work is the pinnacle of Classical-Jazz combination. His works (especially his 8 Concert Etudes) show beautiful, clearly jazz inspired elements whilst having touches of Classical Theory as well. For me, Kapustin is in a way, an opposite to Rachmaninoff; such that Rachmaninoff was a classical composer who used Jazz elements in his work, whilst Kapustin (at least I believe) was a Jazz musician who utilized cues of classical music in his works.
+1 for Kapustin! It's tragic how little he is known about. I especially love his early orchestral and big band works, though Sonata 2 is just gorgeous.
I love atonal music, and I think it can sound beautiful. There are many incredible sounds that can be had when we break away from conventional Western harmony. I also love jazz and jazz-inspired classical music. There's room for all of it.
I recently found out that Schoenberg completely changed his previous views on jazz music when he flew to America. He got to experience more in depth the music and meet the composers and musicians. Adorno always refused to listen to jazz seriously and based his analysis on German bands that imitated American jazz. Even in America, Adorno never wanted to listen to jazz seriously. I deeply admire the onesty and the love for music of Schoenberg (even if I am not a fan of his music) and unfortunately I can not say the same for Adorno.... But the problem is not simply elitism but the whole avant-garde mentality of the time, that mantained that art should be divided into True Art manifesting revolutionary tendencies and vulgar kitsch. I hope this mentality (not restricted ti classical music nor to music) Will Be left behind in the name of a more pluralistic, open-minded and critical mentality that avoids such ideological distinction and focuses on the advantages and the limits of different traditions
Adorno‘s compositions are dull, boring and uninspired. He had a lot to say about music but „said“ very little in his own music. Schönberg actually wrote some very compelling music.
Which is crazy to think as such luminaries as Rachmaninov and Horowitz praised people like Art Tatum. Such interest was shared between Classical and Jazz figures for the most part.
For all those who said that Jerome Kern wrote yesterday‘s, yes that’s correct. But the author of this video never said that Art Tatum wrote yesterdays. As a matter fact, he didn’t write anything as far as I know. What he did compose was his piano arrangement of it, and I think that was clear from the presentation of the author of this video. Great job by the way, I have my own issues that apply to this topic. But I’ll save those for another time thanks.
I actually think attaching a narrative to music makes it more profound. It's why I find music from animated films just as inspiring as any other kind of music, if not moreso.
Yeah there's definitely a real draw there. Since studio Ghibli is king of this, I wonder if the maximum effect is achieved through related visuals and audio that tell a vague yet connected story. That sounds pretentious but I think that the identity of the style mixed with the ambiguity of the story, visuals, and music makes for something really compelling
I have a similar feeling that 18th and 19th century improvisation practice has a lot in common with Jazz tradition. It's definitely something that I think classical education needs to rediscover, and perhaps with the help of Jazz artists. On the other hand, I think that the divide between classical and jazz has created a lot of value. It can allow individuals to go deeper into their respective disciplines, and in some ways the blind spots of each are part of their charm. In a way, I think the increasingly popular idea of embracing all cultures simultaneously helps to erase what makes cultures unique.
As a Jazz musician I often find improvised solos that are partially inspired by classical music, specifically referencing motifs from famous pieces. In these instances, the soloist is essentially admiring classical phrases. People like Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, and Ahmad Jamal have all done this quite frequently.
As an aspiring composer who has played in wind bands, jazz bands and orchestras, I throughly enjoy using jazz rhythms and complex harmony with classical knowledge and styles in my music. It is an absolute tragedy that jazz and classical music hasn't stayed together in cannon, and I hope, at least through my own works, to help change that
Granted though, I left school a while ago and have been teaching myself, so I'm definitely an outlier. I love your videos, they are very useful and I entirely agree that composers need to study the innovations of jazz composers as much as classical composers
I believe that at least in the mid-century more credit could be given to both jazz and classical composers. Post-war era artists had this beautiful symbiosis of idea sharing. A great example would be Darius Milhaud, a classical composer inspired by Jazz, teaching Dave Brubeck, a jazz composer inspired by classical. In this era we also see collaborations between Gil Evans and Miles Davis adapting Porgy and Bess and Concierto de Aranjuez. Bernstein’s West Side Story. The film composers of this era like Henry Mancini. John Coltrane records embrace a heavy degree of classical music theory. The way he viewed the circle of fifths was amazing. Jazz composers of this era were also no strangers to Atonality Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus to name a couple. I totally agree that sometime in the last 30-40 years that relationship has since been broken and it is hard to understand why. One theory in my book is that there is now a struggle to survive and find meaning in an era where pop dominates the culture and both Jazz and Classical are working hard just to preserve their heritages. I will also say that a similar video can be made regarding Electronic music and how there is absolutely no education for composition majors using the medium in their music unless that is specifically what they want to write which requires a separate major altogether and not every university offers it.
As per why this division has deepened in the past 40 years. My theory is that too much of the revolutionary ideologies that came out of the late 60s play too heavy a role in music education and even general education. That generation now constitutes most of the tenured professors at universities. Too much to go into for now especially in a UA-cam comment reply, so perhaps it’ll be a good starting point for another video at some point.
Wonderful essay! As a lover and teacher of both classical and jazz piano, you have given me some wonderful new inspiration of music to listen to with a different ear. The more I learn about either genre, the more I feel that their are so very similar. I make sport of spotting ways to apply theoretical ideas from the one genre, in the other. Lately, all I hear in Mozart are melodic chromatic approaches and enclosures. In Jazz, every cycle of 5th progressions has become 7-6 suspensions with a moving bass note.
As a young composer, I try my hardest to develop my own style. I find atonality stunningly beautiful if it’s own way and I like tonal music so my music has been going inbetween. I find that Atonality isn’t bad, it’s just not understood by the general. I believe that if were only added to in a way to make it a bit more accessible. I don’t agree that atonal works and more modern works are inherently intellectual or elite. Anyone can understand the works and understand how they work even on a basic level. If you look at all music, at one point it was put out as an expression of the elite and intellectualism. It wasn’t until it became widely excepted by the general public that we sort of forgot this - even though classical in itself is seen as elite. Mozart himself wanted to make modern music more accessible to all. We just need someone who can make atonality accessible or at least all modern music in general.
The sweet jazz era of the early-to-mid 1930s is a fascinating period of music. Slower, more melancholic pieces played by thoughtful orchestra directors gave us what could be the most sophisticated era in pop music. The styles of greats such as Ben Selvin, Guy Lombardo, Jack Denny, Richard Himber, etc. showed a perfect combination between the dynamism of jazz and the nuances and structure of classical music, yet still with a pop mindset. Denny in particular usually featured piano duets which _almost_ sound improvised, with gleaming glissandos and playfulness over a still quite discernable melody. The powerful vibrattos played by wind (either brass or brassless) instruments harmonising was also a very unusual detail of this era.
Thank you for projecting the subject on this matter and thank you for being sensitive in the conclusion. One of the atonal composers made me upset a long time ago when I was 20 by him saying that jazz has nothing to do with art. Quotes such as these will always keep musical unity to be impossible to build the bridge of harmony. Fortunately, I'm grateful that composers like Dvorak, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff has glued the elements of two worlds together making it possible for other composers like William Grant Still, Florence Price, Nikolai Kapustin, and so many others like myself to be acknowledged and hopefully appreciated! These videos are great! Please keep up the good work.
I think you should've mentioned the thrid stream movement of the 50s. Jazz band leaders like Teo Marcero, Gunther Schuller and Bob Graettinger were experimenting with Schoenbergs and Webern's language. Also Anthony Braxton, whose Music is in many respects a lot closer to the european post-war avant-garde than it is to jazz.
It's funny because you lament the lack of a middle ground between jazz and classical, even though that middle ground has existed since the 50s. And with later bandleaders like Charles Mingus or Carla Bley you can definitely see that this middle ground was still explored for the rest of the century.
The logical conclusion of Classical tonal harmony is Kaikhosru Sorabji (when Classical music becomes free of the limitations of the stifling predominance of the tonal centre while retaining the spirit of tonal voice leading without outright rejection of diatonicism), and the logical conclusion of Jazz is Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor (when jazz becomes free of the stifling predominance of the 7th interval). That is where the two meet. Cecil Taylor was classically trained. Unfortunately Sorabji is still not recognised by mainstream Classical academia, so until that happens, there will be no formal reconciliation.
In my head lives a happy marriage between classical and jazz :-). Personally I don't see any conflict or distance between modern classical music and jazz. I studied and practice both. Most of the time, classical music, especially the theory developed in the 19th century and later, is perfectly able to explain and understand what happens in jazz. There do exist specific influential jazz theories such as Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (George Russell), or concepts like the bebop scale which was devised from listening to Charlie Parker. However, for me these theories are not necessary. They are distilled from observation of a living tradition, and are as such rather subjective. When you really know and understand what the fundamental ingredients in jazz are, you don't need any extra or separate theoretical system. In recent study books of classical theory and analysis I find everything that can explain jazz. Yes, there are no explicit chapters that describe jazz styles in detail the same way as baroque, romantic music, etc. But that absence doesn't mean there are contradictions. Of course, to see for instance how blues fits in this you have to really understand that music too. There exist very good guides on how to compose for big band and jazz orchestra that rely on the principles of classical counterpoint and voice leading. But there are a lot more useless books on jazz harmony. What we need is good teachers that explain jazz using modern classical music. PS. Don't forget the work of Leonard Bernstein.
I wish you included more examples of jazz composers who brought classical elements into their music, like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and Gil Evans with Miles Davis. still, great vid
Bravo! This video should be watched by modern classical school composers. And perhaps by jazz composers too. The only thing missing here is that while you present classical composers seriously influenced by jazz (Rakhmaninov, Stravinsky, Ravel, etc.), you don't present jazz composers influenced by classical, except for Gershwin. They exist. I heard them. They deserve more attention.
Thanks for this video. I'm doing my best to dip more than a toe into composition, and have zero interest in atonality. Starting this video I thought I had no interest in jazz, but some of the examples you gave of how jazz and classical music began to be profitably and meaningfully melded in the early 20th century definitely made me reconsider my position. Any advice for where to begin learning some jazz theory (for someone who's played the piano all their life and who now tries to write for the piano in a - mostly - late romantic style)? I've just started working on a set of variations, and the idea of writing one with some jazz influence is actually really exciting!
This video misunderstands both the Jazz tradition and the avant-garde: 1. Schoenberg saw his music as inside the German tradition that had historically differentiated "art music" from popular and folkloric music traditions. There was a bourgeois tradition of art making and consuption. This tradition was in crisis at the end of the 19th century. 2. The criticism of the "Frankfurt School" is larger than culture. The video misses the point when does not point out the actual Adornian criticism of capitalism, and its forms of creating a "Cultural Industry" and using it to generate conformity and alienation in the capitalist world. Adorno's point isn't just about jazz (the most popular dance music of its time) it's about how capitalism tends to comodify art and use it to alienate the working class. 3. Jazz has a rich history of emacipating itself from being a product of mass consumption to an elevated art form. Bebop was a reaction to swing music for this very reason! The contradiction of black americans living at that time (and still are) creates and rejuvenates the art form. 4. Much of what happened with "serial composers" and the avant-garde in general in academia and the concert halls has to do with the cold war and the soviet position that art should be created having socialist realism as the main aesthetical guiding principle. The west then embrace the Avant-garde as a form of ideological opposition to the socialist block. Despite the general public not engaging with Avant-garde art at all. 5. Classical music has a long tradition of incorporating folkloric and popular elements to its own culture. Of course it'd happen with Jazz. Although I think it did not happen in academia more because of racism than anything else. I think this is an excellent issue for discussion, but I feel the author misses the mark, in not engaging with the actual arguments of Adorno, as the author did not need to cite Adorno at all to make this point!
Another great example comes from Kurt Atterbergs 6th Symphonie. The last movement has some jazz influences (as Atterbert stated himself in his autobiography), but he also mentioned that they were meant in a slightly ironic way. Still a amazing piece.
I’ve always loved both genres, but also a huge fan of many Latin styles-especially Brazilian music. Brazilian music demonstrates many layers and influences from Europe, indigenous, African, and American jazz music. If you explore MPB music, you can hear a blend of other genres as well.
Excellent video, when you put up a poll beforehand with this question I had a very different approach to what you meant. Specifically I thought you were wondering why jazz isn’t considered classical music. However I totally agree with you that music would’ve given far more delicious fruits if they had never gone down the academic, snobbish and detached route of atonality and instead championed the influences of other cultures music. Jazz is not inherently anti classical in any way at all, hell even late Beethoven wrote pieces that sounded very similar to jazz and blues. This all being said I do believe jazz itself in the way it’s played isn’t, to me, all that appealing. As mentioned by some others, the repetitive nature and underdevelopment of themes in jazz gets boring quite quick for me. I believe, as you correctly pointed out, that some fusion of jazz into all the structure and rich textures of 18th-19th century music would’ve been the key to move forward. Works like rhapsody in blue and rachmaninoffs Paganini variations are great examples of this but there is so much more to be explored!
Hi! Nice video, I really enjoy your work. I just think that you didn't mention the Third Stream, which was a moment in jazz when they fused classical and jazz, which happened in the 50s. It didn't live long enough and as far as I know it didn't have much impact, but after listening to your video I think it should be noticed.
I''m surprised that you could do a video on the allegedly missed opportunities to combine classical and jazz music endnote mention Duke. Ellington. On January 28, 1943 Ellington and nis regular band premiered a 45-minute jazz symphony, "Black, Brown and Beige," representing the history of African-American lives and culture. Contrary to the thesis of your video, classical and jazz music did consciously try to adopt each other's techniques during the 1940's and 1950's. Besides Ellington, among the leaders in this fusion were Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton on the jazz side and Gunther Schuller and George Russell on the classical side.
But there was another stream, from boogie to rock 'n' roll, melding with the folksong revival of the early 60s, evolving into acid rock and heavy metal, some of which is quite sophisticated. For instance, "White Rabbit," an iconic '60s song by Grace Slick, is in the Phrygian mode, which is very hard to make musical sense of because it lacks a dominant. While Varese & co were experimenting with "musique concrete,' Jimi Hendrix was pioneering the possibilities of the electric guitar, amplifiers and feedback, and the Beatles were using electronic effects very effectively in post-production. Shakespeare wrote for the pit, as well as the nobility: the two are not incompatible. Opera plots are often embarrassingly trivial, even ridiculous, but great composers hung great music on them. Composers have never been shy of incorporating popular music - Josquin de Pres, Les cries de Paris; the fashion for using popular tunes as cantus firmus, e.g. L'homme arme, through musical nationalism in the 19th c., Bartok and Kodaly's settings of Hungarian and Romanian folk music. The opening theme of Rach 3 is pinched from a popular Russian song, Yamshchik nie goniy loshadei. just rhythmically shifted. Then Debussy pinched whole-tone gamelan from Indonesia, the Beatles melded with Ravi Shankar and the sitar. The Goin' Home theme of Dvorak 9 uses a pentatonic scale. This 20th century aversion to jazz in particular is nothing but snobbery.
I have alot of questioning with some of your arguments regarding atonality, but you mainly dont like it and thats fine. What i found most surprising is that you didnt mention the composer Kapustin. He is now slowly settling into the standard "classical" repertoire and think he was a great example of a contemporary "classical" composer implementing jazz. Maybe there are not extremely well known classical composers implementing jazz elements but when you look for it they are def there. Another great example would be yoshimatsu or previn in my opinion.
I will make a video at some point about atonal music and composers that I like and respect. I have more of an issue with how heavily it‘s forced on composition students in many of the world‘s top-notch music schools. The willingness to accept Kapustin into the classical repertoire is perhaps an indication that the paradigm is shifting somewhat, but he still represents a rare exception and not the norm.
I disagree with some parts of this video, but I agree with a lot more. That said, I do think you did miss a bit by not talking about the more experimental parts of both types of music since the later part of the twentieth century, such as how American jazz musicians and European classical musicians both came up with free jazz and free improvisation, respectively. There are also some wonderful avant-garde composers who have seamlessly blended the styles of jazz and classical together, such as John Zorn (who I hold to be one of the greatest composers of our time)
Little correction: "Yesterdays" is a standard composed by Jerome Kern for the musical "Roberta", not a composition by Art Tatum. Anyhow, loved the video and the points you made. I dare to say that there are some changes on the way. I feel that young classical music students have an increased interest in improvisation and jazz musicians are searching for other instrumentations and use of bigger forms in their compositions. That said, there's a long road ahead to tear down the artificial walls we built.
I generally agree with the themes presented but fell they were unfairly truncated. The separation exists, but only if one doesn't look carefully: Leonard Bernstein's Second Symphony contains the section "masque" that is a perfect blend of jazz and classical music. Aaron Copeland also used many jazz elements. I liked the fact that the analysis recognized that the New World Symphony was Americanized in technique and composition as much as it was an expression of the composer's time in the United States. In my own compositions that are primarily tonal classical in nature, it has been helpful for me to include jazz progressions. [R. Rich Myers]
Anybody looking at my channel will immediately see how much I value both traditional classical and jazz, but I don't think this opinion piece has much value with only minimal effort to really understand the cultural issues here from the perspective of classical history. Adorno's writings are a lot more compelling than what is represented in this video, even if we choose not to agree!
I think Schoenberg's output made sense in the unique end-of-century Vienna, and he remains a brilliant innovator and composer. But even compared to other contemporaries, to me he seemed to be falling behind as the years went on, stiff and a bit uninspired esp. if compared to Hindemith or Stravinsky who adapted better (in my opinion) the unique sounds of the US, jazz etc. while still maintaining their style. Schoenberg was quintessentially a late-romantic and decadent composer at heart, and it's no secret that his most performed works remain Pelleas, Gurrelieder, Verklarte Nacht or works from his expressionist period. The 12-tone method was also clearly a political tool of supremacy culturally speaking, not just a compositional one.
Good video, but I will say there are also examples of combinations of jazz and classical that are more jazz with classical influence, rather than classical with jazz influence (rhythms, harmonies, etc.), which are what you mostly focus on. For example, the album Romantic Warrior by Return to Forever has major classical influences, played though an electric fusion lens, or a lot of ellingtons big band writing had classical influences. I also disagree that jazz has been stagnating. While in many music institutions it has, there is a lot of boundary pushing modern jazz, like Yussef Dayes or Jojo Mayer, combining elements of things like electronic music or hip hop into jazz
It has probably been mentioned, everything you listed just before 10:14 are prerequisites for any meaningful study of Jazz Harmony, let alone effective Improvisation. Bill Evans was reported to generally only play classical music when he was at home. Jazz Studies requires an awful lot of knowledge that a foundation in classical studies would invariably provide, particularly in an orchestral context. I think what wasn't explored in this video and you did acknowledge this in another comment: film music. FIlm Scores during the rise of Hollywood were the meeting of both jazz motifs as a reflection of the popular music of the day with orchestral scoring rooted in classical training.
I seriously love this video. All classical musicians should learn about Barry Harris and jazz harmony. Bill Dobbins has four great books on jazz, with a video playing a standard in the styles every single major jazz pianists of the 20th century. But it’s so hard for me to get into this without formal education outside of classical music.
I enjoyed the video. But the most basic concept about the two idioms isn't present. Classical Music has a necessary component of control. I may be ignorant of the answer to the question "Have you ever seen 2 names of noted composers listed as "collaborators" on a score? But I look forward to an answer. Classical is the many interpreting the vision of the one. That's not to say that individuals can't bend the composition a bit. But the goal is to play what's on the page. And whats on the page is what came from the mind of one human being. Which isn't to say that all Jazz is purely a creation of the collective. A Duke Ellington piece isn't "a suggestion" of what to play. There are spots that are improvisational and will vary from performance to performance. But it is still a mental vision committed to paper. But the ability to galvanise a group of musicians with no pre -written map is nothing short of amazing. When done right. The old guard had many reasons not to employ the new tonality(s) of Jazz. By the time lovers of the classical style decided what to hate a new style of Jazz was being born. If you grew up on Swing you probably hated Bop. So I can only imagine what lovers of Romantic or Baroque felt about both. Which may explain the explosion of Miles' Kind of Blue. It was a quiet-ing of the atmosphere that was enjoyed by music lovers of every ilk. it''s no coincidence that the players were all lovers of Classical composers. So is it that Classical, no matter how broad, at it's core is the musings of one "man" at a time? One human being admired for guiding a ship in advance. While Jazz at it's core carries on the collective musings of a people (African American) who were forced to navigate, dodge and parry the distinctly American landscape?
> Why Didn't Classical Music Embrace Jazz? also, there's already a vast repertoire of jazz/classical fusion, e. g., works of Nikolai Kapustin, Steve Lehman; (and a great deal of contemporary composers, i guess) (also, you forgot to mention Stravinsky?) Also, about film music - e. g., Miles Davis also wrote a soundtrack (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud)
Thank you for the video, sir; I'm a student myself. Have you heard The Third Piano Concerto of Hisato Ohzawa, "Kamikaze"? I like a lot the 2nd Movement, and I feel it has some reminiscence of Jazz. If you have, what you think of the piece? Have many good days.
Do you consider Bernard Herrmann as a part of the ripe combination, even though he obviously specialized in film music? I have to disagree with the idea of the film accompaniment forcing you to take it in those subordinate terms, at least in the case of Herrmann when he had more freedom to make complete sort of overtures and more thoroughly composed music. I loved Taxi Driver but the music doesn't really make me think of specific sequences other than the dreamlike takes of the NYC night of which my imagination forms complete substitutes. Since Debussy's La Mer is concert music but may as well have been early film music, I would at least allow exceptions for some film music in which the composers were given enough space to operate like that. I also gotta say in only a single week of studying thoroughbass with Corelli's op 5 sonatas that my understanding of working out right hand parts just pieces together exactly with stuff like what the Barry Harris rules were doing for how the pianist would harmonize *without* doubling the bass line they are deriving it from. In continuo you're playing the bass line in your left hand and in jazz you're generally using both hands and avoiding doubling the bass line but they both demand purpose driven approaches to similar goals. There were even areas and trends of continuo playing where they used fuller chords and disregarded some inner voice leading issues.
I consider a lot of film composers to be part of the "ripe combination", however I still find the concert music aspect of jazz and classical to be fairly unexplored. I'm referring more to "jazz" symphonies, concertos, operas... etc. This is why American concert houses showcase nothing but European classics on repeat, because the American classical music intelligentsia of the early to mid 20th century decided that America didn't have its own voice.
I have tried over and over again to learn jazz theory as someone who was taught music theory from a classical perspective. I have read all of the recommended books, taken several courses, and I am still nowhere near understanding. Jazz theory is taught using "chord/scale theory", which goes against everything I was taught about how modes work. So, I am still unable to learn this genre, despite wanting to. It feels as though jazz theory resources aimed at those who learnt classical theory first are few and far between.
Pretty good video, thanks for making this. I am surprised you didn't go over any of the "third wave" composers like Gunther Schuller. It never really took off because it wasn't great, but it was an interesting attempt at synthesizing jazz and classical music.
My main gripe with this video is that there's no such thing as "jazz music". Instead it comprises many different sub genres, some of which are also atonal (free jazz) and as such they are not as fundamentally separated as this video wants me to believe. Rather, some musicians with a background in either type of music have been experimenting with atonality and there are still contemporary composers in both types of music that write "tonal" music (e.g. a lot of minimal music for classical is pretty tonal).
Certain contemporary classical music sounds like it's improvised on the spot, like their score would only have numbers 1, 2,3 etc and "on cue of the conductor : do here some fast notes in answer to the clarinet" or "sing glissando wise starting very high to very low: non, je n'ai pas de chance"
Very interesting video! I think you make a lot of good points, but I feel like your conclusions are a bit pessimistic. My personal experience in this area is quite different so I would like to share a few things. I am a 3rd year bachelor classical flute student at one of the smaller conservatories in the Netherlands. We still have seperate departments for jazz and classical music, but they are 2 parts of the same study and we do a lot together, like during project weeks (we have them at least twice a year), but in some regular classes as well. This week we had a project as well. We are put into groups with people from all years and instruments combined, and each group has a somewhat equal number of both classical and jazz musicians. We had multiple workshops amongst which two about improvisation, one about free (atonal) improvisation, and one about jazz improvisation. We also have to make a performance together that we have to present tomorrow. Our piece has a more folklike/classical sounding part, and a jazzy part which are both full of improvisation. Even though I am very much classically trained, I improvise most of what I have to play, and I even tried improvising a jazz solo which I am also going to do at the presentation tomorrow. I can name a lot more examples of performance I've seen, projects we did, etc that combine influences from both classical music and jazz. There is a lot happening at the moment, at some schools as well. You just have to look for it
I don't know if you have listened the pat metheny group playing the piece called first circle but you could say it has a free version of sonata form i'll leave the link here:
I don't buy the stories about Rachmaninoff and Horowitz's purported praise of Art Tatum. For Horowitz, I came across similar quotes with countless variations ('if only he had been white...', 'his playing made Horowitz weep', etc.) from unsourced blog posts. In his 450 page biography of Horowitz, Harold Schonberg mentions jazz in a single 150-word paragraph, of which the first sentence is: "He liked jazz or, at least, jazz pianists, some of whom almost came up to his own demanding technical standards," then going on to relate a story of music journalist Henry Pleasants, wherein Horowitz, having seen Tatum play his Tea for Two arrangement, asks him how long he took to learn it, to which Tatum "looked at him as though he were crazy", and replied that "he made it up", Schonberg's conclusion being that Horowitz "couldn't understand how Tatum did what he did." No indication here that Horowitz regarded Tatum as the "best pianist of the time", in fact Schonberg quotes Horowitz as saying of Rachmaninoff, "I have said that to me he was the greatest pianist". About Rachmaninoff, I again found many variations and no reputable sources. I would note that the alleged quote about Tatum and 'serious music', is the number one comment on the UA-cam video of Tatum's Yesterdays, which I find telling. Apparently recordings of Tatum's playing being insufficient witness to deify him, the myth-makers feel need to employ some famous names.
idk if its fair to say, but i think "light music" kind of tried to fuse jazz and classical in a sense. And Kasputin i think is a good example of somebody of used classically established form with jazz writing...
I think where classical and jazz meet the same ideas are when both go beyond mental. For classical it was the works of Schönberg and Stockhausen. For Jazz when the 70s hit and every jazz musician thought it's about time to become progressive beyond recognition, crafting pseudo spiritual nonsense at best with only few artists still creating actual music. Also there were and still are classical musicians that embrace jazz and create new fusion style tunes. Like the Klazz Brothers. And there are classically trained jazz musicians that do jazz better then most modern jazz artists like Hiromi.
Two contemporary classically-trained composers touching a lot of jazz I grew fond of: Nahre Sol and David Bruce. Especially David Bruce frequently cooperates with composers of other fields, like jazz and metal, while Nahre Sol explicitly explores styles from different composers of different eras and styles.
Thanks，interesting video. It's like a classic Rousseauian opposition of 'nature is good, non-nature is bad.' Nature vs. non-nature Americas/Africa vs. Europe lifeless contemporary classical music in the laboratory vs. vibrant jazz music growing in the folk I like these.
1. Transcribe 2. Transcribe more 3. Learn jazz standards Mark Levine's Jazz Theory Book is a classic (but maybe a bit rudimentary for an experienced musician) "You'll Hear It" Podcast echos all the best teachings from the jazz masters I've met irl. Jens Larsen's youtube channel is very informative. Aimed at guitarists. Useful for anyone. Berklee's Harmony packet's by Barry Nettles (easily found with google searches) Phil Degreg has a good method book for Jazz piano voicings
Thank you so much for your video!! I'm having a hard time investigating the historical relation and its evolution between the genres. I'm a Jazz student doing an investigative paper trying to figure out if the often contentious relationship between classical and jazz students and schools stems from the early prejudices in relation to Jazz, regarded often as non serious music. Basically i'm trying to figure out if we've inherited the conflict. I would be very thankful if you could direct me to some literature on the topic, if you are aware of any. Thank you so much :)
Dude, that was something :D I obviously hadn't finished watching your video, precisely because I'm digging for information. I, of course, found Adorno's "On Jazz", he seems to be an important piece of the puzzle. I kinda need your thesis. You should write this and publish it! This is really good :D Thank you so much! PS. Just to clarify my research. I conducted a survey with Jazz and Classical students, the divide is real, alive and well. Most students confirm they have either heard or made depreciative comments about the other genre. When I first started studying Jazz I noticed it by befriending a classical pianist who disregarded Jazz completely and I was very confused as to why. I love Classical Music. Chopin and Billy Holliday are probably the two people who have influenced me the most. I'm testing several hypotheses as to why this silent conflict still exists. You pretty much covered them. I looked for old news papers from the beginning of the century (as the one you show) and found so many crazy publications regarding Jazz as the devil music, as more dangerous than alcohol, as something to be banned (as it was in some music and dance schools) as musical bolshevism (Adorno would be pissed 😆, Henry Ford would agree ...🙄). I couldn't help but think that this amount of propaganda may have deeply affected academia and that we're still living the consequences of it without realizing that this is where it comes from. But as you said in one of the comments, it may be better explained simply by elitism. Or they're intertwined.... Anyways, thank you again. I'll definitely mention you in my paper, I hope you don't mind 🙂
I often think that atonal music is most useful for making scary horror music anyway, and that that's the emotional niche where atonal lies and does best.
The flaw of this video is not acknowledging jazz as it is, as a successor of classical. In the creole concert halls of New Orleans classical music was as much a part of the American cannon as the blues or church music, and as creole classical musicians were forced into the brothels and bands of New Orleans to see and hear the rest of American folk music, the genres did mix, and jazz was made as a nephew of the classical tradition.
Classical music has a great and long heritage, but refusing to adopt Jazz into classical music is a shame. If it's a question of atonality, then Jazz does have its players like Cecil Taylor and the Free Jazz movement. But classical music can never shrug off its elitist and overly intellectual proclivity. It can never shrug off the antagonism between “art music” and “popular music.” It can never remove the sublime pretensions between “serious music” and “folk music.” Today, classical music is a form of heightened, intellectual mysticism. It is too clever by half and competes with the theoretical mathematics that informs the physics departments on the true nature of reality. Classical music presents a form of religiosity that substitutes man as the next Creator after the death of God. Classical musicians are like secular priests that still point to the spirit when, and if, possible. That is in their DNA, despite Nietzsche lamenting the Death of God in the 19th century. Yes, man now represents God as a masterful creator. That is the ROMANTIC period, of worshiping the musician as creator, and we are still in that period. However, classical music, with its rich background, is born from FREEDOM. That is “Freedom to.” Jazz is born from the blues, which is also born from FREEDOM. However, that is “Freedom from.” Classical music is always about their aristocratic freedom to do this and that... write a symphony, go on a fox hunt, and seduce that young peasant girl. Blues is always about their being slaves and freedom from this and that... paying the rent, not going to jail, feeling sad your girl ran off, etc. So the two can't really meet each other... unless they become something totally different.
Part of the argument of this video is that until the elitist modernists of the 20th Century came onto the scene, “serious” music was completely fine with adopting folk music or elements from proto-pop music. Dvorak instructed America on the treasure that they had decades before Jazz even existed.
stating jazz's influence on broadway and theater makes it less than because of how the medium is digested i feel is a little dishonest. Sure jazz was heavily used in theater but it was mainly digested at clubs, on a stage where it was freely interpreted, just like another other concert music. To be specific when bebop was being formed it had received a lot of backlash because it became "more about the musicians" than the audience (also receiving backlash on a racial standpoint wasnt helping its progression from the swing era). Jazz was and still is ever evolving and if we look at as the decades passed by we see it becoming less and less involved in theater as a way to coexist and live as entertainment. It is important to clarify the "sub-genre/era" of jazz you are referring for that type of claim. What I mean by this is if you are talking about early jazz and its use on broadway and theater that is referring to the great american songbook, and honestly more pop music. Most of jazz's history does not involve that medium at all and is entirely about the music and the musicians expression of self in the most direct way possible. Jazz's greatest albums, those like A love supreme, Kind of blue, crescent, Speak No Evil etc... are just as heavy and have no relation to theater whatsoever.
also id love to hear you talk about the third stream movement in jazz and classical this was an incredible video, very educational, and of very high quality I look forward to watching more!
It is sad that the music world can have prejudicial ideology. There is nothing wrong with personal musical preference. Bigotry and prejudice are wrong, however. Yes, even in music. Because those sentiments spill over into everything and contaminate all human progress.
I wrestled with doing so in the video, but decided against it, as Kapustin in my opinion is an exception and not part of an overall trend. The same goes for third stream jazz. These are interesting personalities and projects of jazz and classical but are not part of the linear narrative of musical development that classical music academia has developed. This video is more of a comment on the damage that narrative has caused.
@@MusicaUniversalis I just thought it would’ve been worthwhile to mention him as an example of what a blend of jazz and classical could be. But fair enough.
Well modern Jazz Pianists along with film music at times best represent the post 12tone recapitulation of a hipper modern Tonality full of unexpected chromatically altered harmonies verging on polytonality.
Classical can only embrace jazz once it embraces world music. Gottschalk, Bartók, Chopin, Enescu, Liszt - how did they approach cross rhythms and microtones?
There is one ensemble in particular called L'Arpeggiata and they pretty much combine classical tunes from older eras with more traditional world music from the same era. It is happening for such a long time but people prefer to remain ignorant.
@@niemand7811 I really appreciate the recommendation, I'll definitely check them out. I'm fascinated by the history of music for dancing Vs listening. "Pop" music has always been there, but just changing forms. Thanks a million.
I didn't fully understand. If Indian rhythms are very complex should it be considered classical. Maybe it's called Indian classical. There is also Turkish classical. So maybe it's jazz classical. And then there is western classical.
The idea that jazz has stayed in its own lane is completely wrong, whether it's become more electronic, used in hip hop, embraced rock aesthetics, it's evolved almost as much in 100 years as classical music had in 400, this is why classical music couldn't "embrace jazz", because by the time it had started to, jazz had moved on to newer things like bop
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say. Staying in its own lane doesn't mean it didn't evolve in its own lane. I find the statement that jazz evolved in 100 years almost as much as classical did in 400 the sort of jazz elitism I find regrettable. Composers like Kapustin certainly adopted a lot from bebop, but he also threw in structures and forms found in classical music. However Kapustin is the exception and not the norm. The problem is not that classical is some incompetent dead dinosaur of an art form but rather that institutions are poorly educating "classical" composition. Which is why I even recommend in the video that composers would be better off studying jazz than classical common practice theory.
@@MusicaUniversalis Why would they be better off studying Jazz composition than Classical? Jazz has interestingly gone through a tangentially-cerebralized metamorphosis, especially in schools, where students are learning how to basically codify and manufacture something as deep as jazz through a most-often sterilized academic approach. In other words, it has become so (subjectively) concrete, and stripped of it's abstract potential and emotional accessibility, similar to the eclipse of romantic, even impressionist sounds in Classical music.
Aren't mathematical models also cultural, if of a narrower and more literary (value-neutral, as contrasting with "folk") stream of culture as we usually understand them? I would say what compels people to construct mathematics is ultimately emotional and social in nature as well. A tangential and vaguely semantic point on a video I wholly appreciate, thank you!
I don't really understand this video. All the music techniques, either jazz or classical ones, in my understanding, have its origins in the culture. If the culture has changed, then the music born from it would inevitably change as well. If you introduce the techniques of jazz music into classical music composition, if you introduce new cultures that have never been a part of classical music to composition, who will come and define it as „classical music” then?
It sounds like what you are saying is that other music is free to evolve but classical must stay as it is forever, never to absorb new influences or structure. That attitude is what has been killing interest in classical music over the 20th century. General audiences don't want to hear the cerebral music conservatory has trained classical composers to produce since atonality took hold. There is no reason classical can't take up the American folk traditions like jazz or bluegrass we've all grown up with, just as Romantics did with the folk traditions of the various European cultures they grew up with.
@@cynthiacampbell7277 In my opinion, it is exactly because Romantic music absorbed so many other European cultures, that we now see it as a different era than the Classical era. If, as you said, classical music should be free to embrace American folk traditions, should it also embrace maybe Arabic music or East Asian music? Do you think these musics are counted as classical music -> ua-cam.com/video/u0atl2wikzE/v-deo.html and ua-cam.com/video/w8_nggJ5Q4w/v-deo.html .
Oh, and in addition, the intellectuals of the atonal school completely ignored the fact that the general audience doesn't like atonal music, or so they think. Afternoon of the Faun is atonal. It is also beautiful.
Honestly, a lot of the music mentioned in this video reminds me of the soundtrack to Over The Garden Wall: ua-cam.com/video/htnXgyBbiyg/v-deo.html&ab_channel=WaterTowerMusic The miniseries combined older European sensibilities with Americana from the first half of the 20th century, which consequently produces a kind of classical and jazz fusion. I think this musical melding likely helped give the series it's one-of-a-kind, otherworldly beauty.
Correction to the video: A few comments have pointed out that Art Tatum did not write Yesterdays, but rather Jerome Kern. In my defence, I don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz standards, but I thank my subscribers for bringing it to my attention. But here's an interesting philosophical question. Seeing as Art Tatum added so much of his own uniqueness and technique to his version of Yesterdays; at which point does a reworking of a jazz standard become its own thing, or something that wholly belongs to the jazz composer or jazz musician? We give composers credit for each version of the Folia they wrote, but at times jazz musicians do a lot more with standards than some composers did with the Folia. Just a thought, from a classical music point of view.
Love the vid btw
wonder if you would talk more about the (E.u.r. o. p.e.a.n.)(i.n.t. e. l .l.e .c. t .u .a.l.)(E.l.i. t.e .z.) that gave modernism a false legitimacy.
Great!
the folia is a chord progression. if you comp a blues progression, sans original melody or words - is it yours?
There is every reason to primarily credit Tatum imo when the tune is just a vessel by that point. Like to the degree that Brahms' Paganini Variations is Brahms, basically anything Tatum did is Tatum. I just listened to his 1953 Somewhere over the Rainbow again and I'm just awestruck with the devices and variations. There are times where you gotta challenge your ear to keep the tune playing because Tatum will go in and out seamlessly.
I am an amateur jazz musician who recently attempting classical composition seriously. Let me shed some light on the question.
Legally speaking, this is why we have contrafacts. Sometimes, jazz musicians (most notably Charlie Parker) just want to improvise over existing progressions. The original theme and other elements aren't important to them. One of the most, if not the most significant basis for countless contrafacts is the rhythm changes from Gershwin's I Got Rhythm. Jazz musicians would create new melodies over existing chord progressions to avoid copyright issues in composition, performance and recording. That being said, many tunes in the Great American Songbook are old enough to be in public domain. Musicians should have no worry recording All The Things You Are without making a contrafact out of it.
Musically speaking, tunes from the American Songbook are well-crafted. Though not all theme and progressions are innovative, they definitely sound good and can elicit emotional response when you listen to a good performance of them. A jazz musician would then be inspired to learn the tunes and have their own take on them (that's basically how jazz was passed on as it was largely an aural tradition). The inspiration could come from the main theme, the progression or even extra-musical elements like the lyrics or related life experience. In this sense, the musician is still interpreting the tune, no matter how he/she has reworked it. Not to mention good jazz musicians respect traditions and all the greats that come before them. Sometimes, you even find covers where the main theme is completely absent or unrecognizable. But the musicians still use the original titles anyway, Eric Dolphy's interpretation of God Bless The Child from the album The Illinois Concert (absolutely stunning bass clarinet solo, highly recommended). If one recorded All The Things You Are, with the main theme present, but labelled it as something else, I am pretty sure he/she would be destined to be frowned upon by the jazz community.
Absolutely fantastic video. Barry Harris considered jazz music the 'next step' of classical music, and I've always tended to agree. Joe Hisashi's music with Studio Ghibli is another great example of jazz and classical languages fusing together, and that music is basically universally beloved. It feels very modern and also tangibly connected to music history. Anyways, again, great video!
I think Japanese composers have done the perfect combination of what modern classical music should be.
@@d3l_nevplease list a few so I can check them out.
ending up here from your last video master
What about the "Third Stream" "genre"? There was an intent to mix both genres but never succeeded.
Big agree with 8bit here. Contemporary Japanese music integrated jazz in a very unique way. As a result, in these orchestral media music contexts, Japanese composers have made very compelling music the integrates elements from both schools.
As an aspiring composer myself, I find the idea of combining jazz and classical to be an extremely alluring prospect. In my opinion, the classical world’s rejection of jazz is the leading factor as to why modern classical repertoire holds less than a fraction of the cultural relevance it did 100 years ago. I would be absolutely thrilled if you went into further detail on this subject in future videos; it’s a captivating topic.
I couldn't agree more.
have you heard kapustin
@@caoiltemurray9560 yea, any others?
@@nofood1 Gershwin
The other thing is, composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. are held up as being almost gods so suppose you wrote "Caleb Williams Symphony 1". Even if they don't say it out loud, they will think "Beethoven's Fifth is a guaranteed ticket seller whereas nobody knows this Caleb Williams guy". Especially since each of the members of the symphony orchestra needs to be paid, hiring a symphony orchestra will be very expensive.
Modern music software is really going to be the difference for us music composers who don't have millions of dollars.
I'm also finding that "experts" who have opinions on how your composition can be better, don't always have views I agree with. I try it their way and I don't end up with anything that's better, so I just go back to what I like.
You only have to look at Mozart to see potential in Jazz harmony fusing with Classical. Mozart does 2 things almost all the time that are incredibly like Jazz music.
He'll often on the V chord in say C major, play the notes G and F in the left hand and then play B and E in the right hand. That's pretty much exactly a G13 chord (although the resolution of notes is much more strict and formulaic)
He'll also often plays a D# over a C major chord to then resolve it up to an E and this exactly the same blues-original idea in jazz of a minor third resolving up to a major third.
In Beethoven's 5th during the development section, he's briefly playing in F minor, and holding a pedal C note in the horn, he plays a neopolitan 6th chord whilst it's happening. So in modern jazz parlance, hearing it in isolation, it's a Gb add#4 (no 7 so it's not a #11), which is incredibly modern and film like in it's colour
Even Chopin's harmony is ridiculously Jazz-like in places. Loads of extended harmonies, chromatic plaining of chords, even in his Opus 10 Etude no.1 it has, what we would refer to as, tritone subs.
And let's not get into Bach's harmony! We'll be here all day.
So true. Bach's influence can be seen everywhere in jazz. And many contemporary jazz greats, particularly pianists, are classically trained when they were young, e.g. Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, etc. They all take inspirations from classical music and fuse them into jazz. It's really odd to see rejection of jazz in the classical community while the jazz community being completely open to and actually embrace classical.
Beethoven even could be taken as the inventor of Boogie-Woogie. In his last piano sonata, he has a set of variations on a theme, one of which straight sounds like a Boogie-Woogie if played at a fast pace. Only the harmonies still stay within the Classical-Romantic framework, but still it feels not like a long way to go to get to Jazz.
Jazz is Black Music. Don’t do this white washing shit
That is not jazz but common harmonic practices.
99% of what people call jazz harmony is just common harmony that has been used since bach, the only difference is that jazz just hammers the same Harmonic cliches to death over and over, wich is something bach would never do because he would have most likely thought that was stupid.
Los mismos acordes puedes encontrarlos en cualquier genero musical. Esos no son acordes jazz por favor. El jazz es básicamente un ejercicio de improvisación que puede ser más o menos complejo, y puede abarcar todo tipo de estilos musicales. La improvisación puede ser una fase de tantas dentro del proceso de composición de una pieza musical. Lo que es evidente es que al jazz se le dió un carácter religioso en determinado momento quizás para vender más o a saber.
10:18 That's exactly how I feel about (as someone who's more familiar with classical music). As much as I want to appreciate and enjoy jazz more, its "grammar" is different and incomprehensible to me. With classical music, I know what to expect. The well-established forms and structures (be it a sonata form, munet and trio, a suite, etc.) help me understand even unfamiliar pieces. When I listen to jazz, I am captivated and dazzled by the seemingly superhuman abilities to riff and improvise on the spot, but at the same time, at any given time I can't tell if we're in the beginning, middle, or end of a jazz piece because I don't understand its structure. I'm not saying this is bad and jazz has to change or anything like that. I'm just saying it becomes a barrier of entry for a novice like me. Thank you for the wonderful video.
The problem with saying that is that jazz 100% has structure, often influenced by classical music. It is very easy to tell where a jazz piece is going and what to expect. You just have to listen to it more to know where exactly you are.
For me, it's the same with Classical, I have no idea where where the music is in the form when I am listening to it, and I don't know what to expect.
In jazz, the whole point of improvising is make it sound like you're NOT improvising
Yeah I can identify with this. I think that if somebody took jazz and gave it some more structure, that could be really interesting.
So instead of having a looping melody with a couple variations that are improvised over, add some explicit A,B,C sections and improvise over each of them. This could give the listener a real "how are they going to map this improvised idea over the next section" kind of anticipation
I’m glad it’s becoming normal to take atonalism for “a phase” (possibly even the thing that justifiably most harmed concert-going) rather than the “inevitable final stage of elevated, educated music.” It’s a fulfilling conclusion that the renewal of classical music was instead back in its origins, folk music.
This reminds me a lot of Scruton’s writing on the tonal/atonal subject. If you haven’t read it already, you might be interested in this beautiful chapter he wrote, about what he believed was Adorno’s confusion, while offering folk music as the path forward for the classical world, emphasizing jazz and Slavic music examples as far as I can remember. I don’t recall him calling for an embrace in the sense you talked about, but he did argue for the valuing of jazz and other American genres, as opposed to the demeaning of them.
Even though I studied Jazz piano I always play Bach every day and I realized all the harmonic devices used in jazz are already in Bach's music, all that's happened is that they are presented in a different format that is all, for instance I play Bach's Allemande from the French suit in E flat major every day as a warm up exercise which contains arpeggios and melodic lines that are made up from major sevenths, minor sevenths, dominant sevenths diminished and augmented chords just to name a few it's a fantastic piece of music to learn by heart especially if you want to be able to improvise and play Jazz standards like Round Midnight, Over the Rainbow, or Smoke gets in your eyes, which is what's happened to the majority composers and musicians whether they be classical or jazz, smoke has got in their eyes and cotton wool in their ears.
Jazz it's improvised classical music. Musically it has 90% European influences and 10% African and other world influences. Those 10% are the reason classical instituitons didn't embrace jazz.
For me, Kapustin's work is the pinnacle of Classical-Jazz combination. His works (especially his 8 Concert Etudes) show beautiful, clearly jazz inspired elements whilst having touches of Classical Theory as well. For me, Kapustin is in a way, an opposite to Rachmaninoff; such that Rachmaninoff was a classical composer who used Jazz elements in his work, whilst Kapustin (at least I believe) was a Jazz musician who utilized cues of classical music in his works.
+1 for Kapustin! It's tragic how little he is known about. I especially love his early orchestral and big band works, though Sonata 2 is just gorgeous.
I love atonal music, and I think it can sound beautiful. There are many incredible sounds that can be had when we break away from conventional Western harmony. I also love jazz and jazz-inspired classical music. There's room for all of it.
I recently found out that Schoenberg completely changed his previous views on jazz music when he flew to America. He got to experience more in depth the music and meet the composers and musicians.
Adorno always refused to listen to jazz seriously and based his analysis on German bands that imitated American jazz.
Even in America, Adorno never wanted to listen to jazz seriously.
I deeply admire the onesty and the love for music of Schoenberg (even if I am not a fan of his music) and unfortunately I can not say the same for Adorno....
But the problem is not simply elitism but the whole avant-garde mentality of the time, that mantained that art should be divided into True Art manifesting revolutionary tendencies and vulgar kitsch.
I hope this mentality (not restricted ti classical music nor to music) Will Be left behind in the name of a more pluralistic, open-minded and critical mentality that avoids such ideological distinction and focuses on the advantages and the limits of different traditions
Adorno‘s compositions are dull, boring and uninspired. He had a lot to say about music but „said“ very little in his own music. Schönberg actually wrote some very compelling music.
@@MusicaUniversalis Reminds me of Nietzsche's criticism for Brahms.
“Jazz has nothing thing to do with art” was the early 1930s version of “rap isn’t music.”
Which is crazy to think as such luminaries as Rachmaninov and Horowitz praised people like Art Tatum. Such interest was shared between Classical and Jazz figures for the most part.
Thats ignorance for ya 💁♀️
Rap isn’t music
For all those who said that Jerome Kern wrote yesterday‘s, yes that’s correct. But the author of this video never said that Art Tatum wrote yesterdays. As a matter fact, he didn’t write anything as far as I know. What he did compose was his piano arrangement of it, and I think that was clear from the presentation of the author of this video. Great job by the way, I have my own issues that apply to this topic. But I’ll save those for another time thanks.
I actually think attaching a narrative to music makes it more profound. It's why I find music from animated films just as inspiring as any other kind of music, if not moreso.
Yeah there's definitely a real draw there. Since studio Ghibli is king of this, I wonder if the maximum effect is achieved through related visuals and audio that tell a vague yet connected story.
That sounds pretentious but I think that the identity of the style mixed with the ambiguity of the story, visuals, and music makes for something really compelling
I have a similar feeling that 18th and 19th century improvisation practice has a lot in common with Jazz tradition. It's definitely something that I think classical education needs to rediscover, and perhaps with the help of Jazz artists.
On the other hand, I think that the divide between classical and jazz has created a lot of value. It can allow individuals to go deeper into their respective disciplines, and in some ways the blind spots of each are part of their charm. In a way, I think the increasingly popular idea of embracing all cultures simultaneously helps to erase what makes cultures unique.
As a Jazz musician I often find improvised solos that are partially inspired by classical music, specifically referencing motifs from famous pieces. In these instances, the soloist is essentially admiring classical phrases. People like Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, and Ahmad Jamal have all done this quite frequently.
As an aspiring composer who has played in wind bands, jazz bands and orchestras, I throughly enjoy using jazz rhythms and complex harmony with classical knowledge and styles in my music. It is an absolute tragedy that jazz and classical music hasn't stayed together in cannon, and I hope, at least through my own works, to help change that
Granted though, I left school a while ago and have been teaching myself, so I'm definitely an outlier. I love your videos, they are very useful and I entirely agree that composers need to study the innovations of jazz composers as much as classical composers
I believe that at least in the mid-century more credit could be given to both jazz and classical composers. Post-war era artists had this beautiful symbiosis of idea sharing. A great example would be Darius Milhaud, a classical composer inspired by Jazz, teaching Dave Brubeck, a jazz composer inspired by classical.
In this era we also see collaborations between Gil Evans and Miles Davis adapting Porgy and Bess and Concierto de Aranjuez. Bernstein’s West Side Story. The film composers of this era like Henry Mancini. John Coltrane records embrace a heavy degree of classical music theory. The way he viewed the circle of fifths was amazing.
Jazz composers of this era were also no strangers to Atonality Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus to name a couple.
I totally agree that sometime in the last 30-40 years that relationship has since been broken and it is hard to understand why. One theory in my book is that there is now a struggle to survive and find meaning in an era where pop dominates the culture and both Jazz and Classical are working hard just to preserve their heritages.
I will also say that a similar video can be made regarding Electronic music and how there is absolutely no education for composition majors using the medium in their music unless that is specifically what they want to write which requires a separate major altogether and not every university offers it.
As per why this division has deepened in the past 40 years. My theory is that too much of the revolutionary ideologies that came out of the late 60s play too heavy a role in music education and even general education. That generation now constitutes most of the tenured professors at universities. Too much to go into for now especially in a UA-cam comment reply, so perhaps it’ll be a good starting point for another video at some point.
This video beautifully expressed many of the sentiments I have held for a long time
Wonderful essay! As a lover and teacher of both classical and jazz piano, you have given me some wonderful new inspiration of music to listen to with a different ear. The more I learn about either genre, the more I feel that their are so very similar. I make sport of spotting ways to apply theoretical ideas from the one genre, in the other. Lately, all I hear in Mozart are melodic chromatic approaches and enclosures. In Jazz, every cycle of 5th progressions has become 7-6 suspensions with a moving bass note.
As a young composer, I try my hardest to develop my own style. I find atonality stunningly beautiful if it’s own way and I like tonal music so my music has been going inbetween. I find that Atonality isn’t bad, it’s just not understood by the general. I believe that if were only added to in a way to make it a bit more accessible. I don’t agree that atonal works and more modern works are inherently intellectual or elite. Anyone can understand the works and understand how they work even on a basic level. If you look at all music, at one point it was put out as an expression of the elite and intellectualism. It wasn’t until it became widely excepted by the general public that we sort of forgot this - even though classical in itself is seen as elite. Mozart himself wanted to make modern music more accessible to all. We just need someone who can make atonality accessible or at least all modern music in general.
listen to the solo piano in Aladine Sane song (Bowie) this is how atonal music becomes a hit.
The sweet jazz era of the early-to-mid 1930s is a fascinating period of music. Slower, more melancholic pieces played by thoughtful orchestra directors gave us what could be the most sophisticated era in pop music.
The styles of greats such as Ben Selvin, Guy Lombardo, Jack Denny, Richard Himber, etc. showed a perfect combination between the dynamism of jazz and the nuances and structure of classical music, yet still with a pop mindset.
Denny in particular usually featured piano duets which _almost_ sound improvised, with gleaming glissandos and playfulness over a still quite discernable melody. The powerful vibrattos played by wind (either brass or brassless) instruments harmonising was also a very unusual detail of this era.
Thank you for projecting the subject on this matter and thank you for being sensitive in the conclusion. One of the atonal composers made me upset a long time ago when I was 20 by him saying that jazz has nothing to do with art. Quotes such as these will always keep musical unity to be impossible to build the bridge of harmony.
Fortunately, I'm grateful that composers like Dvorak, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff has glued the elements of two worlds together making it possible for other composers like William Grant Still, Florence Price, Nikolai Kapustin, and so many others like myself to be acknowledged and hopefully appreciated!
These videos are great! Please keep up the good work.
I think you should've mentioned the thrid stream movement of the 50s.
Jazz band leaders like Teo Marcero, Gunther Schuller and Bob Graettinger were experimenting with Schoenbergs and Webern's language.
Also Anthony Braxton, whose Music is in many respects a lot closer to the european post-war avant-garde than it is to jazz.
It's funny because you lament the lack of a middle ground between jazz and classical, even though that middle ground has existed since the 50s.
And with later bandleaders like Charles Mingus or Carla Bley you can definitely see that this middle ground was still explored for the rest of the century.
The logical conclusion of Classical tonal harmony is Kaikhosru Sorabji (when Classical music becomes free of the limitations of the stifling predominance of the tonal centre while retaining the spirit of tonal voice leading without outright rejection of diatonicism), and the logical conclusion of Jazz is Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor (when jazz becomes free of the stifling predominance of the 7th interval). That is where the two meet. Cecil Taylor was classically trained. Unfortunately Sorabji is still not recognised by mainstream Classical academia, so until that happens, there will be no formal reconciliation.
Incredible video. Thank you for mentioning Leroy Anderson, his piano concerto is a great discovery, wonderful, charming music!
what a great channel! I hope you keep it up and can get the recognition you deserve
In my head lives a happy marriage between classical and jazz :-). Personally I don't see any conflict or distance between modern classical music and jazz. I studied and practice both. Most of the time, classical music, especially the theory developed in the 19th century and later, is perfectly able to explain and understand what happens in jazz. There do exist specific influential jazz theories such as Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (George Russell), or concepts like the bebop scale which was devised from listening to Charlie Parker. However, for me these theories are not necessary. They are distilled from observation of a living tradition, and are as such rather subjective. When you really know and understand what the fundamental ingredients in jazz are, you don't need any extra or separate theoretical system. In recent study books of classical theory and analysis I find everything that can explain jazz. Yes, there are no explicit chapters that describe jazz styles in detail the same way as baroque, romantic music, etc. But that absence doesn't mean there are contradictions. Of course, to see for instance how blues fits in this you have to really understand that music too. There exist very good guides on how to compose for big band and jazz orchestra that rely on the principles of classical counterpoint and voice leading. But there are a lot more useless books on jazz harmony. What we need is good teachers that explain jazz using modern classical music. PS. Don't forget the work of Leonard Bernstein.
I wish you included more examples of jazz composers who brought classical elements into their music, like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and Gil Evans with Miles Davis. still, great vid
Bravo! This video should be watched by modern classical school composers. And perhaps by jazz composers too.
The only thing missing here is that while you present classical composers seriously influenced by jazz (Rakhmaninov, Stravinsky, Ravel, etc.), you don't present jazz composers influenced by classical, except for Gershwin. They exist. I heard them. They deserve more attention.
This is a fantastic video. Very well measured
Thanks for this video. I'm doing my best to dip more than a toe into composition, and have zero interest in atonality. Starting this video I thought I had no interest in jazz, but some of the examples you gave of how jazz and classical music began to be profitably and meaningfully melded in the early 20th century definitely made me reconsider my position. Any advice for where to begin learning some jazz theory (for someone who's played the piano all their life and who now tries to write for the piano in a - mostly - late romantic style)? I've just started working on a set of variations, and the idea of writing one with some jazz influence is actually really exciting!
This video misunderstands both the Jazz tradition and the avant-garde:
1. Schoenberg saw his music as inside the German tradition that had historically differentiated "art music" from popular and folkloric music traditions. There was a bourgeois tradition of art making and consuption. This tradition was in crisis at the end of the 19th century.
2. The criticism of the "Frankfurt School" is larger than culture. The video misses the point when does not point out the actual Adornian criticism of capitalism, and its forms of creating a "Cultural Industry" and using it to generate conformity and alienation in the capitalist world. Adorno's point isn't just about jazz (the most popular dance music of its time) it's about how capitalism tends to comodify art and use it to alienate the working class.
3. Jazz has a rich history of emacipating itself from being a product of mass consumption to an elevated art form. Bebop was a reaction to swing music for this very reason! The contradiction of black americans living at that time (and still are) creates and rejuvenates the art form.
4. Much of what happened with "serial composers" and the avant-garde in general in academia and the concert halls has to do with the cold war and the soviet position that art should be created having socialist realism as the main aesthetical guiding principle. The west then embrace the Avant-garde as a form of ideological opposition to the socialist block. Despite the general public not engaging with Avant-garde art at all.
5. Classical music has a long tradition of incorporating folkloric and popular elements to its own culture. Of course it'd happen with Jazz. Although I think it did not happen in academia more because of racism than anything else.
I think this is an excellent issue for discussion, but I feel the author misses the mark, in not engaging with the actual arguments of Adorno, as the author did not need to cite Adorno at all to make this point!
Another great example comes from Kurt Atterbergs 6th Symphonie. The last movement has some jazz influences (as Atterbert stated himself in his autobiography), but he also mentioned that they were meant in a slightly ironic way. Still a amazing piece.
I’ve always loved both genres, but also a huge fan of many Latin styles-especially Brazilian music. Brazilian music demonstrates many layers and influences from Europe, indigenous, African, and American jazz music. If you explore MPB music, you can hear a blend of other genres as well.
Excellent video, when you put up a poll beforehand with this question I had a very different approach to what you meant. Specifically I thought you were wondering why jazz isn’t considered classical music. However I totally agree with you that music would’ve given far more delicious fruits if they had never gone down the academic, snobbish and detached route of atonality and instead championed the influences of other cultures music. Jazz is not inherently anti classical in any way at all, hell even late Beethoven wrote pieces that sounded very similar to jazz and blues. This all being said I do believe jazz itself in the way it’s played isn’t, to me, all that appealing. As mentioned by some others, the repetitive nature and underdevelopment of themes in jazz gets boring quite quick for me. I believe, as you correctly pointed out, that some fusion of jazz into all the structure and rich textures of 18th-19th century music would’ve been the key to move forward. Works like rhapsody in blue and rachmaninoffs Paganini variations are great examples of this but there is so much more to be explored!
Hi! Nice video, I really enjoy your work. I just think that you didn't mention the Third Stream, which was a moment in jazz when they fused classical and jazz, which happened in the 50s. It didn't live long enough and as far as I know it didn't have much impact, but after listening to your video I think it should be noticed.
George Gershwin: "hold my Rhapsody."
Mingus and Zappa combined the two masterfully
20th-century music did, until Adorno said it wasn't cool.
Adorno is a literal academic fraud - It's actually very sad people still cover him in colleges and universities.
I''m surprised that you could do a video on the allegedly missed opportunities to combine classical and jazz music endnote mention Duke. Ellington. On January 28, 1943 Ellington and nis regular band premiered a 45-minute jazz symphony, "Black, Brown and Beige," representing the history of African-American lives and culture. Contrary to the thesis of your video, classical and jazz music did consciously try to adopt each other's techniques during the 1940's and 1950's. Besides Ellington, among the leaders in this fusion were Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton on the jazz side and Gunther Schuller and George Russell on the classical side.
But there was another stream, from boogie to rock 'n' roll, melding with the folksong revival of the early 60s, evolving into acid rock and heavy metal, some of which is quite sophisticated. For instance, "White Rabbit," an iconic '60s song by Grace Slick, is in the Phrygian mode, which is very hard to make musical sense of because it lacks a dominant. While Varese & co were experimenting with "musique concrete,' Jimi Hendrix was pioneering the possibilities of the electric guitar, amplifiers and feedback, and the Beatles were using electronic effects very effectively in post-production. Shakespeare wrote for the pit, as well as the nobility: the two are not incompatible. Opera plots are often embarrassingly trivial, even ridiculous, but great composers hung great music on them. Composers have never been shy of incorporating popular music - Josquin de Pres, Les cries de Paris; the fashion for using popular tunes as cantus firmus, e.g. L'homme arme, through musical nationalism in the 19th c., Bartok and Kodaly's settings of Hungarian and Romanian folk music. The opening theme of Rach 3 is pinched from a popular Russian song, Yamshchik nie goniy loshadei. just rhythmically shifted. Then Debussy pinched whole-tone gamelan from Indonesia, the Beatles melded with Ravi Shankar and the sitar. The Goin' Home theme of Dvorak 9 uses a pentatonic scale. This 20th century aversion to jazz in particular is nothing but snobbery.
I have alot of questioning with some of your arguments regarding atonality, but you mainly dont like it and thats fine. What i found most surprising is that you didnt mention the composer Kapustin. He is now slowly settling into the standard "classical" repertoire and think he was a great example of a contemporary "classical" composer implementing jazz. Maybe there are not extremely well known classical composers implementing jazz elements but when you look for it they are def there. Another great example would be yoshimatsu or previn in my opinion.
But i agree on the fact that its stupid that the jazz and classical departments are so seperated from eachother..
I will make a video at some point about atonal music and composers that I like and respect. I have more of an issue with how heavily it‘s forced on composition students in many of the world‘s top-notch music schools.
The willingness to accept Kapustin into the classical repertoire is perhaps an indication that the paradigm is shifting somewhat, but he still represents a rare exception and not the norm.
I disagree with some parts of this video, but I agree with a lot more. That said, I do think you did miss a bit by not talking about the more experimental parts of both types of music since the later part of the twentieth century, such as how American jazz musicians and European classical musicians both came up with free jazz and free improvisation, respectively. There are also some wonderful avant-garde composers who have seamlessly blended the styles of jazz and classical together, such as John Zorn (who I hold to be one of the greatest composers of our time)
This is video was worth every minute!
Little correction: "Yesterdays" is a standard composed by Jerome Kern for the musical "Roberta", not a composition by Art Tatum.
Anyhow, loved the video and the points you made. I dare to say that there are some changes on the way. I feel that young classical music students have an increased interest in improvisation and jazz musicians are searching for other instrumentations and use of bigger forms in their compositions. That said, there's a long road ahead to tear down the artificial walls we built.
Thanks for the clarification, but I think we can all admit that Art Tatum made any standard his own.
I generally agree with the themes presented but fell they were unfairly truncated. The separation exists, but only if one doesn't look carefully: Leonard Bernstein's Second Symphony contains the section "masque" that is a perfect blend of jazz and classical music. Aaron Copeland also used many jazz elements. I liked the fact that the analysis recognized that the New World Symphony was Americanized in technique and composition as much as it was an expression of the composer's time in the United States. In my own compositions that are primarily tonal classical in nature, it has been helpful for me to include jazz progressions. [R. Rich Myers]
Anybody looking at my channel will immediately see how much I value both traditional classical and jazz, but I don't think this opinion piece has much value with only minimal effort to really understand the cultural issues here from the perspective of classical history. Adorno's writings are a lot more compelling than what is represented in this video, even if we choose not to agree!
I think Schoenberg's output made sense in the unique end-of-century Vienna, and he remains a brilliant innovator and composer. But even compared to other contemporaries, to me he seemed to be falling behind as the years went on, stiff and a bit uninspired esp. if compared to Hindemith or Stravinsky who adapted better (in my opinion) the unique sounds of the US, jazz etc. while still maintaining their style. Schoenberg was quintessentially a late-romantic and decadent composer at heart, and it's no secret that his most performed works remain Pelleas, Gurrelieder, Verklarte Nacht or works from his expressionist period. The 12-tone method was also clearly a political tool of supremacy culturally speaking, not just a compositional one.
Good video, but I will say there are also examples of combinations of jazz and classical that are more jazz with classical influence, rather than classical with jazz influence (rhythms, harmonies, etc.), which are what you mostly focus on. For example, the album Romantic Warrior by Return to Forever has major classical influences, played though an electric fusion lens, or a lot of ellingtons big band writing had classical influences.
I also disagree that jazz has been stagnating. While in many music institutions it has, there is a lot of boundary pushing modern jazz, like Yussef Dayes or Jojo Mayer, combining elements of things like electronic music or hip hop into jazz
It has probably been mentioned, everything you listed just before 10:14 are prerequisites for any meaningful study of Jazz Harmony, let alone effective Improvisation. Bill Evans was reported to generally only play classical music when he was at home. Jazz Studies requires an awful lot of knowledge that a foundation in classical studies would invariably provide, particularly in an orchestral context.
I think what wasn't explored in this video and you did acknowledge this in another comment: film music. FIlm Scores during the rise of Hollywood were the meeting of both jazz motifs as a reflection of the popular music of the day with orchestral scoring rooted in classical training.
I seriously love this video. All classical musicians should learn about Barry Harris and jazz harmony. Bill Dobbins has four great books on jazz, with a video playing a standard in the styles every single major jazz pianists of the 20th century. But it’s so hard for me to get into this without formal education outside of classical music.
I enjoyed the video. But the most basic concept about the two idioms isn't present.
Classical Music has a necessary component of control. I may be ignorant of the answer to the question "Have you ever seen 2 names of noted composers listed as "collaborators" on a score? But I look forward to an answer. Classical is the many interpreting the vision of the one. That's not to say that individuals can't bend the composition a bit. But the goal is to play what's on the page. And whats on the page is what came from the mind of one human being.
Which isn't to say that all Jazz is purely a creation of the collective. A Duke Ellington piece isn't "a suggestion" of what to play. There are spots that are improvisational and will vary from performance to performance. But it is still a mental vision committed to paper. But the ability to galvanise a group of musicians with no pre -written map is nothing short of amazing. When done right.
The old guard had many reasons not to employ the new tonality(s) of Jazz. By the time lovers of the classical style decided what to hate a new style of Jazz was being born. If you grew up on Swing you probably hated Bop. So I can only imagine what lovers of Romantic or Baroque felt about both.
Which may explain the explosion of Miles' Kind of Blue. It was a quiet-ing of the atmosphere that was enjoyed by music lovers of every ilk. it''s no coincidence that the players were all lovers of Classical composers.
So is it that Classical, no matter how broad, at it's core is the musings of one "man" at a time? One human being admired for guiding a ship in advance. While Jazz at it's core carries on the collective musings of a people (African American) who were forced to navigate, dodge and parry the distinctly American landscape?
> Why Didn't Classical Music Embrace Jazz?
also, there's already a vast repertoire of jazz/classical fusion, e. g., works of Nikolai Kapustin, Steve Lehman; (and a great deal of contemporary composers, i guess) (also, you forgot to mention Stravinsky?)
Also, about film music - e. g., Miles Davis also wrote a soundtrack (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud)
Thank you for the video, sir; I'm a student myself. Have you heard The Third Piano Concerto of Hisato Ohzawa, "Kamikaze"? I like a lot the 2nd Movement, and I feel it has some reminiscence of Jazz. If you have, what you think of the piece?
Have many good days.
Do you consider Bernard Herrmann as a part of the ripe combination, even though he obviously specialized in film music?
I have to disagree with the idea of the film accompaniment forcing you to take it in those subordinate terms, at least in the case of Herrmann when he had more freedom to make complete sort of overtures and more thoroughly composed music. I loved Taxi Driver but the music doesn't really make me think of specific sequences other than the dreamlike takes of the NYC night of which my imagination forms complete substitutes. Since Debussy's La Mer is concert music but may as well have been early film music, I would at least allow exceptions for some film music in which the composers were given enough space to operate like that.
I also gotta say in only a single week of studying thoroughbass with Corelli's op 5 sonatas that my understanding of working out right hand parts just pieces together exactly with stuff like what the Barry Harris rules were doing for how the pianist would harmonize *without* doubling the bass line they are deriving it from. In continuo you're playing the bass line in your left hand and in jazz you're generally using both hands and avoiding doubling the bass line but they both demand purpose driven approaches to similar goals. There were even areas and trends of continuo playing where they used fuller chords and disregarded some inner voice leading issues.
I consider a lot of film composers to be part of the "ripe combination", however I still find the concert music aspect of jazz and classical to be fairly unexplored. I'm referring more to "jazz" symphonies, concertos, operas... etc. This is why American concert houses showcase nothing but European classics on repeat, because the American classical music intelligentsia of the early to mid 20th century decided that America didn't have its own voice.
I have tried over and over again to learn jazz theory as someone who was taught music theory from a classical perspective. I have read all of the recommended books, taken several courses, and I am still nowhere near understanding. Jazz theory is taught using "chord/scale theory", which goes against everything I was taught about how modes work. So, I am still unable to learn this genre, despite wanting to. It feels as though jazz theory resources aimed at those who learnt classical theory first are few and far between.
Listen to Maria Schneider’s albums “concert in the garden”, “ the Thompson fields” or “ sky blue”. She figured out the classical/jazz comboz
Whatever you can imagine can/will be done
Pretty good video, thanks for making this. I am surprised you didn't go over any of the "third wave" composers like Gunther Schuller. It never really took off because it wasn't great, but it was an interesting attempt at synthesizing jazz and classical music.
My main gripe with this video is that there's no such thing as "jazz music". Instead it comprises many different sub genres, some of which are also atonal (free jazz) and as such they are not as fundamentally separated as this video wants me to believe. Rather, some musicians with a background in either type of music have been experimenting with atonality and there are still contemporary composers in both types of music that write "tonal" music (e.g. a lot of minimal music for classical is pretty tonal).
What I learned: Too many snobbish people messing with music.
Certain contemporary classical music sounds like it's improvised on the spot, like their score would only have numbers 1, 2,3 etc and "on cue of the conductor : do here some fast notes in answer to the clarinet" or "sing glissando wise starting very high to very low: non, je n'ai pas de chance"
6:32 Piece name and recording?
Tea for Two by Art Tatum
Tea for two, I think played by Art Tatum. The pianist mentioned as the best, by Horrowitz & Rachmnaninoff.
ua-cam.com/video/kACt0FM0Kf8/v-deo.html
Thanks so much!
didnt mention the blues with jazz
Very interesting video! I think you make a lot of good points, but I feel like your conclusions are a bit pessimistic. My personal experience in this area is quite different so I would like to share a few things. I am a 3rd year bachelor classical flute student at one of the smaller conservatories in the Netherlands. We still have seperate departments for jazz and classical music, but they are 2 parts of the same study and we do a lot together, like during project weeks (we have them at least twice a year), but in some regular classes as well. This week we had a project as well. We are put into groups with people from all years and instruments combined, and each group has a somewhat equal number of both classical and jazz musicians. We had multiple workshops amongst which two about improvisation, one about free (atonal) improvisation, and one about jazz improvisation. We also have to make a performance together that we have to present tomorrow. Our piece has a more folklike/classical sounding part, and a jazzy part which are both full of improvisation. Even though I am very much classically trained, I improvise most of what I have to play, and I even tried improvising a jazz solo which I am also going to do at the presentation tomorrow. I can name a lot more examples of performance I've seen, projects we did, etc that combine influences from both classical music and jazz. There is a lot happening at the moment, at some schools as well. You just have to look for it
And we have composers as well who are also spread out over all groups during the project
What about Gershwin?!
Didn’t watch the whole video did we?
What are your thoughts on Ellington's Nutcracker Suite?
I don't know if you have listened the pat metheny group playing the piece called first circle but you could say it has a free version of sonata form i'll leave the link here:
ua-cam.com/video/1qRb1xt1APE/v-deo.html
I don't buy the stories about Rachmaninoff and Horowitz's purported praise of Art Tatum.
For Horowitz, I came across similar quotes with countless variations ('if only he had been white...', 'his playing made Horowitz weep', etc.) from unsourced blog posts. In his 450 page biography of Horowitz, Harold Schonberg mentions jazz in a single 150-word paragraph, of which the first sentence is: "He liked jazz or, at least, jazz pianists, some of whom almost came up to his own demanding technical standards," then going on to relate a story of music journalist Henry Pleasants, wherein Horowitz, having seen Tatum play his Tea for Two arrangement, asks him how long he took to learn it, to which Tatum "looked at him as though he were crazy", and replied that "he made it up", Schonberg's conclusion being that Horowitz "couldn't understand how Tatum did what he did." No indication here that Horowitz regarded Tatum as the "best pianist of the time", in fact Schonberg quotes Horowitz as saying of Rachmaninoff, "I have said that to me he was the greatest pianist".
About Rachmaninoff, I again found many variations and no reputable sources. I would note that the alleged quote about Tatum and 'serious music', is the number one comment on the UA-cam video of Tatum's Yesterdays, which I find telling.
Apparently recordings of Tatum's playing being insufficient witness to deify him, the myth-makers feel need to employ some famous names.
I have always thought Classical and jazz have been combined in songs like George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”.
Could you please do a video of Rachmaninoff?
Have you never heard Gunther Schuller's work. ??? Why didn't jazz embrace classical ??? Warren
idk if its fair to say, but i think "light music" kind of tried to fuse jazz and classical in a sense. And Kasputin i think is a good example of somebody of used classically established form with jazz writing...
I think where classical and jazz meet the same ideas are when both go beyond mental. For classical it was the works of Schönberg and Stockhausen. For Jazz when the 70s hit and every jazz musician thought it's about time to become progressive beyond recognition, crafting pseudo spiritual nonsense at best with only few artists still creating actual music.
Also there were and still are classical musicians that embrace jazz and create new fusion style tunes. Like the Klazz Brothers. And there are classically trained jazz musicians that do jazz better then most modern jazz artists like Hiromi.
Two contemporary classically-trained composers touching a lot of jazz I grew fond of: Nahre Sol and David Bruce. Especially David Bruce frequently cooperates with composers of other fields, like jazz and metal, while Nahre Sol explicitly explores styles from different composers of different eras and styles.
this is great. my music undergrad was a mixed bag of classical, atonal, numusic, and jazz. needless to say it left me befuddled
Thanks，interesting video.
It's like a classic Rousseauian opposition of 'nature is good, non-nature is bad.'
Nature vs. non-nature
Americas/Africa vs. Europe
lifeless contemporary classical music in the laboratory vs. vibrant jazz music growing in the folk
I like these.
Of course, once you get to bebop, hard bop, and post-bop, it starts sounding borderline atonal anyway.
To bridge jazz and classical music which books or practices do you guys recommend for a classical leaning musician?
1. Transcribe 2. Transcribe more 3. Learn jazz standards
Mark Levine's Jazz Theory Book is a classic (but maybe a bit rudimentary for an experienced musician)
"You'll Hear It" Podcast echos all the best teachings from the jazz masters I've met irl.
Jens Larsen's youtube channel is very informative. Aimed at guitarists. Useful for anyone.
Berklee's Harmony packet's by Barry Nettles (easily found with google searches)
Phil Degreg has a good method book for Jazz piano voicings
Good advice 👆🏻
Thank you so much for your video!! I'm having a hard time investigating the historical relation and its evolution between the genres. I'm a Jazz student doing an investigative paper trying to figure out if the often contentious relationship between classical and jazz students and schools stems from the early prejudices in relation to Jazz, regarded often as non serious music. Basically i'm trying to figure out if we've inherited the conflict. I would be very thankful if you could direct me to some literature on the topic, if you are aware of any. Thank you so much :)
Dude, that was something :D I obviously hadn't finished watching your video, precisely because I'm digging for information. I, of course, found Adorno's "On Jazz", he seems to be an important piece of the puzzle. I kinda need your thesis. You should write this and publish it! This is really good :D Thank you so much!
PS. Just to clarify my research. I conducted a survey with Jazz and Classical students, the divide is real, alive and well. Most students confirm they have either heard or made depreciative comments about the other genre. When I first started studying Jazz I noticed it by befriending a classical pianist who disregarded Jazz completely and I was very confused as to why. I love Classical Music. Chopin and Billy Holliday are probably the two people who have influenced me the most. I'm testing several hypotheses as to why this silent conflict still exists. You pretty much covered them. I looked for old news papers from the beginning of the century (as the one you show) and found so many crazy publications regarding Jazz as the devil music, as more dangerous than alcohol, as something to be banned (as it was in some music and dance schools) as musical bolshevism (Adorno would be pissed 😆, Henry Ford would agree ...🙄). I couldn't help but think that this amount of propaganda may have deeply affected academia and that we're still living the consequences of it without realizing that this is where it comes from. But as you said in one of the comments, it may be better explained simply by elitism. Or they're intertwined.... Anyways, thank you again. I'll definitely mention you in my paper, I hope you don't mind 🙂
I often think that atonal music is most useful for making scary horror music anyway, and that that's the emotional niche where atonal lies and does best.
Huge underrated video
Share it
Excellent video
Duke Ellington dude? You didn’t mention him? Why? Why wasn’t he here?
The flaw of this video is not acknowledging jazz as it is, as a successor of classical. In the creole concert halls of New Orleans classical music was as much a part of the American cannon as the blues or church music, and as creole classical musicians were forced into the brothels and bands of New Orleans to see and hear the rest of American folk music, the genres did mix, and jazz was made as a nephew of the classical tradition.
Classical music has a great and long heritage, but refusing to adopt Jazz into classical music is a shame. If it's a question of atonality, then Jazz does have its players like Cecil Taylor and the Free Jazz movement. But classical music can never shrug off its elitist and overly intellectual proclivity. It can never shrug off the antagonism between “art music” and “popular music.” It can never remove the sublime pretensions between “serious music” and “folk music.” Today, classical music is a form of heightened, intellectual mysticism. It is too clever by half and competes with the theoretical mathematics that informs the physics departments on the true nature of reality. Classical music presents a form of religiosity that substitutes man as the next Creator after the death of God. Classical musicians are like secular priests that still point to the spirit when, and if, possible. That is in their DNA, despite Nietzsche lamenting the Death of God in the 19th century. Yes, man now represents God as a masterful creator. That is the ROMANTIC period, of worshiping the musician as creator, and we are still in that period. However, classical music, with its rich background, is born from FREEDOM. That is “Freedom to.” Jazz is born from the blues, which is also born from FREEDOM. However, that is “Freedom from.” Classical music is always about their aristocratic freedom to do this and that... write a symphony, go on a fox hunt, and seduce that young peasant girl. Blues is always about their being slaves and freedom from this and that... paying the rent, not going to jail, feeling sad your girl ran off, etc. So the two can't really meet each other... unless they become something totally different.
Part of the argument of this video is that until the elitist modernists of the 20th Century came onto the scene, “serious” music was completely fine with adopting folk music or elements from proto-pop music. Dvorak instructed America on the treasure that they had decades before Jazz even existed.
stating jazz's influence on broadway and theater makes it less than because of how the medium is digested i feel is a little dishonest. Sure jazz was heavily used in theater but it was mainly digested at clubs, on a stage where it was freely interpreted, just like another other concert music. To be specific when bebop was being formed it had received a lot of backlash because it became "more about the musicians" than the audience (also receiving backlash on a racial standpoint wasnt helping its progression from the swing era). Jazz was and still is ever evolving and if we look at as the decades passed by we see it becoming less and less involved in theater as a way to coexist and live as entertainment. It is important to clarify the "sub-genre/era" of jazz you are referring for that type of claim. What I mean by this is if you are talking about early jazz and its use on broadway and theater that is referring to the great american songbook, and honestly more pop music. Most of jazz's history does not involve that medium at all and is entirely about the music and the musicians expression of self in the most direct way possible. Jazz's greatest albums, those like A love supreme, Kind of blue, crescent, Speak No Evil etc... are just as heavy and have no relation to theater whatsoever.
also id love to hear you talk about the third stream movement in jazz and classical this was an incredible video, very educational, and of very high quality I look forward to watching more!
It is sad that the music world can have prejudicial ideology. There is nothing wrong with personal musical preference. Bigotry and prejudice are wrong, however. Yes, even in music. Because those sentiments spill over into everything and contaminate all human progress.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Nikolai Kapustin.
I wrestled with doing so in the video, but decided against it, as Kapustin in my opinion is an exception and not part of an overall trend. The same goes for third stream jazz. These are interesting personalities and projects of jazz and classical but are not part of the linear narrative of musical development that classical music academia has developed. This video is more of a comment on the damage that narrative has caused.
@@MusicaUniversalis I just thought it would’ve been worthwhile to mention him as an example of what a blend of jazz and classical could be. But fair enough.
Well modern Jazz Pianists along with film music at times best represent the post 12tone recapitulation of a hipper modern Tonality full of unexpected chromatically altered harmonies verging on polytonality.
Classical can only embrace jazz once it embraces world music. Gottschalk, Bartók, Chopin, Enescu, Liszt - how did they approach cross rhythms and microtones?
There is one ensemble in particular called L'Arpeggiata and they pretty much combine classical tunes from older eras with more traditional world music from the same era. It is happening for such a long time but people prefer to remain ignorant.
@@niemand7811 I really appreciate the recommendation, I'll definitely check them out. I'm fascinated by the history of music for dancing Vs listening. "Pop" music has always been there, but just changing forms. Thanks a million.
I didn't fully understand. If Indian rhythms are very complex should it be considered classical. Maybe it's called Indian classical. There is also Turkish classical. So maybe it's jazz classical. And then there is western classical.
The idea that jazz has stayed in its own lane is completely wrong, whether it's become more electronic, used in hip hop, embraced rock aesthetics, it's evolved almost as much in 100 years as classical music had in 400, this is why classical music couldn't "embrace jazz", because by the time it had started to, jazz had moved on to newer things like bop
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say. Staying in its own lane doesn't mean it didn't evolve in its own lane. I find the statement that jazz evolved in 100 years almost as much as classical did in 400 the sort of jazz elitism I find regrettable. Composers like Kapustin certainly adopted a lot from bebop, but he also threw in structures and forms found in classical music. However Kapustin is the exception and not the norm. The problem is not that classical is some incompetent dead dinosaur of an art form but rather that institutions are poorly educating "classical" composition. Which is why I even recommend in the video that composers would be better off studying jazz than classical common practice theory.
@@MusicaUniversalis Why would they be better off studying Jazz composition than Classical?
Jazz has interestingly gone through a tangentially-cerebralized metamorphosis, especially in schools, where students are learning how to basically codify and manufacture something as deep as jazz through a most-often sterilized academic approach. In other words, it has become so (subjectively) concrete, and stripped of it's abstract potential and emotional accessibility, similar to the eclipse of romantic, even impressionist sounds in Classical music.
Aren't mathematical models also cultural, if of a narrower and more literary (value-neutral, as contrasting with "folk") stream of culture as we usually understand them? I would say what compels people to construct mathematics is ultimately emotional and social in nature as well.
A tangential and vaguely semantic point on a video I wholly appreciate, thank you!
I don't really understand this video.
All the music techniques, either jazz or classical ones, in my understanding, have its origins in the culture. If the culture has changed, then the music born from it would inevitably change as well.
If you introduce the techniques of jazz music into classical music composition, if you introduce new cultures that have never been a part of classical music to composition, who will come and define it as „classical music” then?
Intressting point!
It sounds like what you are saying is that other music is free to evolve but classical must stay as it is forever, never to absorb new influences or structure. That attitude is what has been killing interest in classical music over the 20th century. General audiences don't want to hear the cerebral music conservatory has trained classical composers to produce since atonality took hold. There is no reason classical can't take up the American folk traditions like jazz or bluegrass we've all grown up with, just as Romantics did with the folk traditions of the various European cultures they grew up with.
@@cynthiacampbell7277 In my opinion, it is exactly because Romantic music absorbed so many other European cultures, that we now see it as a different era than the Classical era. If, as you said, classical music should be free to embrace American folk traditions, should it also embrace maybe Arabic music or East Asian music?
Do you think these musics are counted as classical music -> ua-cam.com/video/u0atl2wikzE/v-deo.html and ua-cam.com/video/w8_nggJ5Q4w/v-deo.html .
Oh, and in addition, the intellectuals of the atonal school completely ignored the fact that the general audience doesn't like atonal music, or so they think. Afternoon of the Faun is atonal. It is also beautiful.
what if it’s mor music
Art Tatum did not write "Yesterdays". It was written by Jerome Kern.
Someone brought this to my attention already. I have pinned a comment clarifying the error.
Honestly, a lot of the music mentioned in this video reminds me of the soundtrack to Over The Garden Wall: ua-cam.com/video/htnXgyBbiyg/v-deo.html&ab_channel=WaterTowerMusic
The miniseries combined older European sensibilities with Americana from the first half of the 20th century, which consequently produces a kind of classical and jazz fusion. I think this musical melding likely helped give the series it's one-of-a-kind, otherworldly beauty.
George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein both embraced jazz.