seven ways to sunday
Andrea La Rose
About this work:
As a classically trained musician, I have only dabbled in jazz. Some people manage to do a serious study of both jazz and classical, but not me. I love jazz, but I’ve been turned off by the frequent presentation of it as the music that has exclusive rights to improvisation. In fact, improvisation used to be a large part of classical composition, performance, and pedagogy. Certainly improvisation is a part of many musics around the world, but despite this knowledge, it took me a long time to forgive myself for never studying bebop. Several composers in the 20th century, particularly American ones, began to experiment with various types of improvisation in their compositions. At the beginning of my exploration in including improvisation in my work, I looked at pieces by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Fredric Rzewski, and others. The result was a concerto, in which the soloist freely improvised over the “guided” improvisations of the accompanying ensemble.
With seven ways I wanted to explore different degrees of improvisation. Some of the movements are very open and some are more like games, in which the rules are rather strict but the results are never quite the same. I wanted to blur the lines between composition and improvisation. I didn’t want everything to be totally free (then there’s no need for notes on the page, which is fine, but obviously gives me nothing to do as a composer), but I wanted to avoid the traditional play-the-song-improvise-on-the-song-repeat-the-song forms usually found in bebop. I wanted to make it difficult to pinpoint where the written directions end (or even what they were) and where the improvised parts begin.
Year composed: 2004
Duration: 00:20:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 2-5 players
Instrumentation:
Instrumentation notes: any 3 instruments