The Third Stream: Beautiful Music, Essay Example

There are few things that are more fun than attending musical productions when all of the musicians love the music that they are playing. On February 19, 2013, the New England Conservatory (NEC) Department of Contemporary Improvisation presented “From Third Stream to Contemporary Improvisation” under the artistic direction of Gunther Schuller and Tanya Kalmanovitch. When the curtain went up a little after 98:00 pm, the audience’s anticipation could be felt throughout Jordan Hall. As the program stated “The possibilities are endless” and that is exactly how the concert felt. This paper will summarize and review the concert in the first section, then summarize and respond to the idea of a third stream as it was thought of by Schuller and Blake, the founders of the Third Stream and Contemporary Improvisation at the NEC. In so doing the paper will argue that the February 19^th concert did exactly what the founders hoped it would, show how the marriage of diverse forms of music can create something new and fantastic.

The Concert

The first thing to note is that Jordan Hall is stunning in every way. It would be very hard not to love the music that comes to the audience from the stage. It is hard to imagine a setting that could do a better job of showing the musicians and their music in a better light. The acoustics are amazing. Most importantly, one could hear the soft parts of the music that were intended to be played very quietly and pick out every pluck of every string. The musicians were all superb and wonderful to watch. Overall, it was an exciting concert that made me want to know more, to hear more and to perhaps play myself.

The concert opened with three pieces that go together to show the roots of jazz and how they were intermingled, or at least one can see how they are contemporaries. The concert opened with Scott Joplin’s “The Ragtime Dance” a four-minute piece of fun that sets the tone for the evening. The start of the song almost feels like a military song or perhaps an accompaniment to an old western movie. That is until the piano starts in with that familiar ragtime style of play. The sliding violin, if that is what it is called, was particularly sharp and fun. Also the full band feel of the chorus and the clapping got the audience into the music. A piece by Charles Ives, a contemporary of Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, followed called “A Set of Pieces.” It was quite a change with the strong almost pounding of the piano to start, a nice way to show the difference in classical and ragtime. The clarinet and piano at the very beginning and then how the violins came in really had that jazz improvisation kind of feel. Beautifully played and felt like a storm in places and a complete mish mash including hearing the clarinet put out these sharp tones like a train, which was followed by the punctuation of the entire orchestra at times: A fascinating piece. It was followed by Jelly Roll Morton’s “Grandpa’s Spells” from the first bars was jazzy and fun. The clarinets again were at the front only this time they were swinging along with the trumpets. It was a fun tune that took the same instruments and used them in an entirely different sound, but still kept up a bit of the commotion that Ives’ piece had.

The next group, if that is a fair way to think about how Schuller and Kalmanovitch created the program, moves to two new pieces. One can think about it as Schuller and Tal Zilber combining the roots of jazz and classical music showing how to combine them. Schuller’s piece is jazzy in places and it was very contemporary – there were many influences in it and was hard to pin down, in a good way. Zilber’s music was so interesting with the piano starting off in a Joplin crispness but then it got busier and crazier until it was almost too much when again, the clear piano sound came out. It was one of the coolest pieces.

African American spirituals “Early in the Morning” and “Go Down Old Hannah,” my favorite pieces, were beautiful in their execution. They showed how the history of western music and the African traditions were both so crucial to jazz. From the slide sound, to the call and response – one part calling out the other part of the orchestra answering, done really nicely with the harmonica – was soulful and sad and joyous all at the same time. Exactly what a spiritual should be.

Many of those sounds came in the last music that was played. Simon Hanes “Ultimo” was another favorite with its parts that sounded like clear jazz played in this light and almost scary way. The musicians kept the piano going, where that jazz sound would dart out, then the snare drum would come in with that jazzy sound, and then it would move on again. Taylor and Azalez’s “Improvisation #3 Recomposed” uses strings to the same effect almost as the harmonica. It sounds a bit like call and response to at the start. It is a long and interesting musical composition that sounds more classical with other influences. The violin playing is beautiful and sorrowful.

Fang’s piece “Clouds Rise” was stunning. It had many of the ideas that were in other pieces, the fast picking of the strings at the start were like Zilber’s piano keys thrashing. But it was very soft and while it clearly gave off a Far Eastern feel it was also very modern too. I am not sure how to describe it except to say that it had that big, sweeping beautiful almost epic feel to it. It was floating and just lovely. Then about halfway through the same instruments are used to create a different sound with a different beat. It was an amazing piece. Balter’s composition “That Sort of Pretty One for the Big Group” closed the evening and it also was perfect. It starts off so quietly that there was a curiosity about how it would all go.

The Third Stream

Ran Blake is one of the creative forces behind the idea of Third Stream Music along with Gunther Schuller, who became the artistic director to the NEC in 1967 when it was nearly bankrupt and had almost no students (West 2009). Schuller’s original idea was that Third Stream Music would show how classical and black music leave a space between them that could be the fusion of the two kinds of music: “the improvisational spontaneity and rhythmic vitality of jazz with compositional procedures and techniques acquired in Western music” (Blake 1981). This idea was the basis for Schuller and Blake founding the Third Stream Department in 1972.

As for Schuller, most would describe him as a modernist. His former student Ken Schaphorst sees him as someone who “has no patience for people repeating what’s been done, for music that isn’t really pushing him as the listener” (Schaporst quoted in West 2009). It was that impatience that led him to open the very first jazz program in the United States, which was then called Afro-American Music. He was after all in the birthplace of jazz and he believed, as did Blake, that this was music that should be taught. But he did not want his students simply to learn jazz he wanted the faculty to share what they had learned, and for the students to know what it was like to learn it on the bandstand. So students, consistent with his style, were given jazz and classical training in technique (West 2009).

Eventually the Third Stream was created as a “marriage of jazz and classical” (West 2009). He did not want to make music for the commercial value, but for the different musical forms – 300,000 vernacular musics, to “integrate, cross-fertilize…at the purest level” (West 2009). Blake added onto this idea by adding other forms of ethnic music, and West argues that the department was built around Blake’s vision (West 2009). He thought that not only was it apparent that jazz and classical were important, but so were other forms of ethnic music many being played in the United States some were not. He used the example of Nigeria tribal music and its use of percussion blended with the cries of the Ainu from the north of Japan (Blake 1981). Further, he thought of Third Music Stream more as a verb and thought of it as something that musicians would be doing, so that the music is more improvised. Therefore he saw it having three parts of third streaming: process, improvisation and personal (Blake 1981).

What Blake wanted to point out is that it is the ear is the important part of this entire process. Because it is the ear that allows the musicians to hear things and make new sounds, not reproduce what others have already done. Like Schuller, who also disliked music that was just another version of the same melody, the importance of improvisation using the ear was the important part. Therefore much of the time was spent exploring other musical forms, from Mahalia Jackson to Schuller to the bossa nova to Charles Ives: all music was welcome. Then there was a bigger emphasis back to jazz so that they could understand the importance of this improvisational American music (Blake 1981).

Wedded Bliss

Schuller and Blake’s idea that at its base jazz can be married to classical and music and at its broadest point all musical forms can be joined to one another in an endless form of creation is fascinating. It is less random than it sounds, and less uniform than taking one style of music and learning it, studying it on its own. The best examples perhaps are Schuller’s own piece “Transformation” and Simon Hanes “Ultimo.” These two pieces show how the mergers, or the cross-fertilization and integration actually can work. In the case of Schuller, his piece uses every kind of jazzy bits and then moves out into territory that one does not expect to go. Ultimo shows the jazz influence differently, it comes out clearly within all of these background sounds. Perhaps Zilber’s piece deserves mention here too because he showed improvisation and creativity by taking one of Schuller’s pieces and turning it into his own, exemplifying Blake’s three ideas of process, improve and personal meaning.

The second idea of Blake and Schuller that the music can move beyond two forms to take on as many as it likes is shown in the African American prison songs and in Fang’s piece. Again, the different kinds of musical influences are all there to be heard. The third idea, the ear that the music has to be important to the listener was the best achievement of the concert. So many of the pieces required that I listen so closely and so carefully. Rarely was I sitting there not thinking about what I was listening to in a way that I never listened to concerts before.

All of these ideas came together in the concert with music that seemed new in the way that the concert was presented and new music that was a marriage of all different kinds of sounds. The overall effect was the best of what I imagine a marriage would be: different comes coming together not always in one way, but making a beautiful sound.

Conclusion

This paper has examined the NEC’s concert “From Third Stream to Contemporary Improvisation,” and examined the concept of Third Stream by Schuller and Blake. The paper argued that the ideas of third streaming, nameless process, improvisation and personal feel for the music were all shown in the concert to great effect.

Works Cited

Blake, Ran. “Third Stream and the Importance of the Ear: A Position Paper in Narrative Form.” College Music Symposium, Journal of the College Music Society, 21.2 (Fall 1981). Web. Accessed March 16, 2013.

< http://www.pabloziffer.com.ar/imagesartics/BlakeCMSarticle.pdf >

West, Michael J. “The New England Conservatory: A Tradition of Innovation.” JazzTimes.

November 19, 2009. Web. Accessed March 16, 2013.

< http://jazztimes.com/articles/25548-the-new-england-conservatory-a-tradition-of-innovation >