POST IMPRESSIONS | BIRDSONG | THE SCORDATURA PROJECT | GROOVE THEORY | JIM PEPPER TRIBUTE |
VIOLINS IN THE OUTBACK | GREAT FENCES OF AUSTRALIA | HOLLIS TAYLOR: SOLO, DUO, QUARTETTO | THE COWBOY FIDDLE OF BUS BOYK

PIED BUTCHERBIRD SONG: THE MUSIC OF NATURE AND THE NATURE OF MUSIC

Few topics bridge the divide between the humanities and natural sciences more effectively than the quest for an understanding of the origins of culture.

THE SCORDATURA PROJECT

As usual, the Italians say it best: scordatura (from scordare, to mistune). And mistune the violin they did, beginning in the early sixteenth century and continuing until 1750. By this time the standard G-D-A-E tuning was codified, and the disadvantages of scordatura gradually led to its near abandonment. It is now considered an eccentricity.

Reclaiming the scordatura strategy gave me great flexibility in finding new chords and relationships on the violin, often aided by an extended downward range. The sympathetic vibration of certain tunings creates a rich sound. Fresh tonal colorings and tensions surface, and each violin becomes a veritable new instrument.

The Scordatura Project surveys a half dozen or more tunings. Works by seventeenth century violinists such as Heinrich von Biber and Biagio Marini are followed by the Pastorale of Tartini (A-E-A-E) and the Sonate énigmatique attributed to Pietro Nardini (C-F-A-E) where the violinist can play his own bass). The remarkable L’art du violon by Baillot (1834) has a cadenza where the G string is tuned downwards through semitones while playing. A morning raga from the Karnatic classical music of South India finds the violin tuned F-C-F-C.

In addition to art music, I mine the scordatura traditions of American fiddle tunes, where it was common practice until 75 years ago; the Turkish Çiftetelli, or “double strings”, which allows musicians to play in octaves; and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, which has more than twenty recognized tunings (A-E-A-C#, known as the “Troll” tuning, is used, appropriately, between midnight and sunrise; A-D-A-E, A-E-A-E, and A-E-A-C# are also common. Less often seen are G-D-A-C#, G-D-A-B, G-D-G-E, A-D-F#-E, G-E-B-C#, and F#-D-A-E).

Concerts conclude with Trail Mix, a solo violin suite that follows the history of my pioneer family in Oregon back to 1854. The work took First Prize in the 2000 National League of American PEN Women Composition Contest. Each of the five movements explores a different tuning:

The Scordatura Project debuted at the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum, Belgium, in May 2005 and was featured at the Melbourne Festival in October 2005.

GROOVE THEORY

"Wow! What a knockout of a piece! So imaginative and perfectly executed. I enjoyed every delicious second." David Schiff, composer/music critic.

Concerto for Violin with Strings, Harpsichord, and Percussion by Hollis Taylor. The instrumentation is violin soloist, string orchestra of at least 5 first violins, 4 second violins, 3 violas, 2 celli, 1 bass, 1 harpsichord, and 1 percussion. Duration is approximately 25 minutes.

String Theory is the current theory of everything, an all-encompassing explanation for our universe, which claims that all matter is composed of tiny vibrating strings. These strings are the smallest possible building blocks of reality. Groove Theory is my corollary theory of everything which claims that all music must swing and dance and pulse and groove.

The four movements variously reflect the use of chromaticism and slides as connecting devices; employ figure/ground reversal with the soloist and orchestra (a riff on current physics which states that a wave is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle); and draw on techniques such as counterpoint (including retrograde, inversions, etc.), symmetrical sections and scales, and strange loops which return to an original key or motif.

1. "Trip the Light Fantastic." This expression was originated by John Milton in "L'Allegro," 1632, "Come and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe." Although "fantastick" was not the name of any particular dance, the phrase came to mean "to dance." It survived and was revived in the popular song "The Sidewalks of New York," 1894. Electro-magnetism, one of the four forces to be united by string theory, appears in the introduction which explores the dualities of light and dark, and during moments when the orchestra exists more as the sound of electricity than as pitch. Small hand-held penlights will illuminate the bows. The lower strings employ them for tapping as well. The soloist is sometimes part of the rhythm section and vice versa, a variation on the modern physics mystery that a wave is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle. The theme is based on "La Monica," a fifteenth century Italian popular song; it appears here set in tropical rhythms.
2. "Blues for Terra Incognita." String theory suggests that our world has six more dimensions than the ones we experience (the standard three plus time). This movement is a blues for what we cannot see but can perhaps imagine, however dimly. The strings are half pizzicato, half with drumsticks col legno.
3. "Quantum Jitterbug." An up-tempo bebop movement with references and quotations from the Baroque era, this takes its name from quantum jitters, the wild bouncing of the subatomic world.
4. "Gravity's Tango." Above a certain size, above the quantum stuff, gravity holds sway. This movement makes use of slides and chromatic scales, especially descending ones, in honor of gravity.

JIM PEPPER TRIBUTE

THE HOLLIS TAYLOR SEXTET performs a tribute to jazz legend JIM PEPPER. Instrumentation: string quartet, jazz acoustic bass, and vocalist/chanter. Arrangers: Gordon Lee, David Schiff, and Hollis Taylor, three composers known for their work in both jazz and classical fields.

Saxophonist/singer/composer Jim Pepper, who was of Creek and Kaw ancestry, was the first to incorporate elements of Native American music with jazz and rock fusion. He had musical associations with such jazz greats as Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Bob Moses, Larry Coryell, Mal Waldron, Charlie Hayden, and Carla Bley. His career was marked by an astonishingly rich and diverse array of recordings and performances. Pepper's recording of his grandfather's peyote chant, Witchi Tai To, helped him develop a crossover hit on both the jazz and Top 40 charts.

Pepper's life and music harmonized two distinct cultures and served as a poetic example for all indigenous people, "walking in two worlds with one spirit." His life was cut short by cancer in 1992, a few months short of his 51st birthday. He was posthumously awarded the First Americans in the Arts' Lifetime Achievement in Music award in 1999. A documentary on Pepper, "Pepper's Pow Wow," was made by Makah filmmaker Sandra Sunrising Osawa.

About the arrangers: GORDON LEE performed with Jim Pepper throughout North America and Europe. He is the pianist with Mel Brown's Sextet, who played Lee's compositions and arrangements when they won the 1989 International Hennessy Jazz Search. Lee has played in the pop and jazz arena with Gladys Night and the Pips, Bobby Vinton, the Temptations, Dewey Redman, Bobby Hutcherson, Leroy Vinegar, and others. He also performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Oregon Festival Symphony. Lee receives regular composition commissions and is on the faculty of Western Oregon University where he teachs jazz improvisation and history and directs the big band.

DAVID SCHIFF, well-known composer, music critic, and musical scholar, is the author of two books, "The Music of Elliott Carter" and "George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue." Schiff's major commissions include works for the Oregon Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Gold Coast Chamber Music Festival, and the 125th anniversary of Congregation Beth Israel. "Divertimento" from Schiff's opera, "Gimpel the Fool," was recorded by artists from Chamber Music Northwest. Articles about music by Schiff have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement of London, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the Richard Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College, where he received the Burlington Northern Award for excellence in teaching.

HOLLIS TAYLOR was the youngest member of the Oregon Symphony at 18. She went on to win the Oregon State Old Time Fiddle Championship and later focused on jazz. "Twisted Fiddle," her jazz-influenced arrangements of country classics, was nominated 1991 Folk Album of the Year by the National Association of Independent Record Distributors. "Trail Mix for Five Scordatura Violins" from her CD "Frames and Boxes" won first prize from the National League of American PEN Women. Grants from the American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer helped to fund her violin concerto "Groove Theory." She divides her time between Portland, Paris, Sydney, and New York City.

Willamette Week says of the composer/arrangers: "All three of these composers are hybrid hunters who punch at the perceived walls between the jazz and classical fields to let in fresh melodic and rhythmic light. Taylor's a master instrumentalist nationally recognized for her gift of genre-hopping in the classical, jazz and folk fields. Lee has been a staple on the Portland jazz scene for 15 years, and it's not unusual for him to splash a Rachmaninoff flourish in the midst of a Mel Brown groove. He has a master's degree in conducting and consistently composes pieces in the classical realm. Schiff is one of classical music's refreshing composers, combining jarring rhythms in works like "Stomp" and his upcoming Violin Concerto that speak in a jazz voice."

PROGRAM:

Fantasia on a Theme by Jim Pepper
David Schiff

3/4 Gemini arranged by David Schiff

Water arranged by Hollis Taylor

Jumpin' Gemini arranged by Hollis Taylor

Remembrance arranged by Gordon Lee

Comin' and Goin' arranged by Gordon Lee

Custer Gets It—War Dance arranged by Gordon Lee

Lakota Song arranged by Gordon Lee

Witchi Tai To arranged by Gordon Lee

VIOLINS IN THE OUTBACK

"Are there any kangaroos in the audience?" I asked—a flippant question, admittedly, but an affirmative answer was not out of the realm of possibility. After all, I was at Wogarno Outback Sheep Station in Western Australia. Closest city: Perth, an eight-hour drive away on the Indian Ocean, with claims to being the world's most isolated capital city. Closest town: I'll get back to you on that.

I was on stage performing when it occurred to me that kangaroos are nocturnal, and I was still awaiting my first close-up meeting with these marsupials, reputed to have the most beautiful eyes. If they showed up, I wanted to know. The stage was a proper one, although it abutted a sheep shearing shed, and the ceiling was the star-filled austral sky. The festival, entitled "Violins in the Outback," included my set of American fiddle music, a string quartet, a string orchestra, fence music, and wire music. My informal tally: Audience members, 700; kangaroos, zero. I cannot complain. Most of the audience had driven hours to be there, and they were starved for live music, whereas "roos" are commonplace to them. The musicians' own drive, a day-long bus trip from Perth, had revealed a subtle landscape with variations on a theme of harsh beauty: ancient rocks, stunted trees and bushes for whom every day is a bad-hair day, and red soil parched by the unrelenting sun. A wedge-tailed eagle refused to budge from his kangaroo road kill, forcing our bus to swerve. An occasional emu darted across the road. A four-foot-long striped lizard sunned himself. As a native of the American West, I figured any eight hours of driving should reveal at least a few wonders, and I was at full attention.

Our last rest stop before Wogarno had been Payne's Find, now evidently a ghost town, save for the roadhouse. The name hails from a late-19th-century gold rush, and mining is still the area's economic mainstay. After we reboarded the bus, someone told me that the proprietor, whose duties would keep him from the weekend concerts, had been hoping to hear me play. These thoughts and visions floated through me as I completed my performance of bluegrass, western swing, and Texas-style fiddle tunes. That left the stage set for the evening's multimedia finale, "The Violin Factory" by Australian violinist and composer Jon Rose. Rose spent the 1970s constructing extraordinary hybrid instruments—violins with extra necks, violins joined like Siamese twins, aeolian violins with sails, violins with FM broadcast systems inside, violins with megaphones and internal amplification, a microtonal long-neck violin with 16 strings, and the like (as if anything could actually be like what he makes and plays).

To feed his passion, Rose passed many hours looking through junk shops in Sydney for the cheapest instruments money could buy. Violins in bad condition were often given to him. He became aware that most had been made in China, notably the "Skylark" models. "I started to imagine the factories where these instruments were produced," Rose told me, "full of massed laboring violin makers." Although professional violinists in the West rejected such instruments as unplayable, and even unlistenable, he took the opposite view. With their shrill tone, they sounded to him closer to the er-hu (the traditional Chinese two-string violin) than to our western model of beauty and perfection, the Strad. "Because of their cheap price," Rose said, "I had no qualms about hacking into them with saw and drill to experiment with my own mutations."

Then, in the 1990s, by invitation from the International Jazz Festival Beijing, Rose went to China. In two visits to factories, he witnessed the bizarre yet impressive process of violin mass production. "They used a specially designed German steam press to stamp out ten at a time," he said. "They had a machine that haired and tightened up the bow in one go, completing one every five seconds."

His awestruck observations inspired "The Violin Factory," a wild, surrealist fantasy featuring string orchestra and conductor, along with various and subtle "industrial process" rhythms manufactured by three young Perth composers. Rose served as a second conductor for these "industrials," and he performed live orchestral sampling and interactive accelerometer-driven string samples (all this while conducting with what he called "Mao's embalmed left arm," which looked suspiciously like a pink dishwashing glove).

A Red Guard "factory guide" sat perched above the orchestra on the sheep chute, saluting the agony and ecstasy of thousands of violin makers in the People's Republic by reciting Mao's stern words in Chinese and English. Meanwhile, two videographers projected onto the shearing shed a riveting mix of images: violin-factory workers filmed in China, and the live string players in Wogarno. Counterpoint is obviously key to Rose, and his compulsion was evident in small details such as portraits of individual string players, which ran on rhythmic loops in conversation with the orchestral rhythms.

Rose's hour-long work is first and foremost a memorable piece of music, and it could be performed without the other elements. The string writing alternates between lively industrial music, which manages to impart the factory cliché without sounding clichéd, and inspired moments of meditation reminiscent of Messiaen. Rose's chords often seem corrupted versions of major triads with extra tones fixed to them, like barnacles to a ship.

But if elegance is found in refusal, "The Violin Factory" is elegant indeed. Rose incorporates both scored and improvised sections—and while much of the music is evidently in loops, since the musicians hardly ever turn a page, the effect is of a thoroughly composed work. Loops are never placed on a platter for us to admire a la Minimalism but are instead disguised, and the result is surprisingly fresh.

Our second day at Wogarno began with "Fence Music"—Rose applying a bass bow, plus fingers, hands, and the occasional leg, to amplified fence wires. Two small microphones were embedded in the natural holes of the wooden posts. Several hundred people gathered, not new-music fans, particularly, but locals nonetheless open to the unfamiliar sounds of familiar objects, open to their landscape being suddenly recast as soundscape.

Following the fence music, I fiddled acoustically on Lizard Rock, an Aboriginal site. Just finding it was an adventure. Situated five miles from the sheep station up a four-wheel-drive road, then farther up a rocky hill on foot, the Lizard Rock country revealed an even more rugged beauty than I had yet seen. Several hundred people stood in the sun on this enormous red rock to hear me, and I was touched by their committed curiosity.

After brunch back at the homestead, we headed out to another remote site, where Perth physician and sound artist Alan Lamb had set up several installations for a performance dubbed "Wire Music." For his main installation, he stretched two long lengths of heavy-duty wire over large boulders and up a hill to collect sounds produced from the wind. We hiked through torturous and aptly-named needle grass and across gentler rock outcroppings to hear it for ourselves, then descended to a landing where flat rocks lay strewn like pieces of an impossible puzzle. We lingered until sunset, 300 strong. I felt like a member of a tribe, our communion enhanced by a stash of champagne on ice in the bed of a pickup, its cool effervescence seemingly just another natural wonder.

The next morning, on the way back to Perth, the bus made another stop at the Payne's Find Roadhouse, and this time I was ready. Violin behind my back, I asked the proprietor if he was the disappointed fan of fiddle music. He nodded, and I launched into the "Cotton Patch Rag" to his evident shock—strolling violins are always a bit too close, somehow bigger than life in an awkward way—and his joy. His wife and customers seemed to agree that avoid had been filled, none of them having heard American fiddle tunes except in Hollywood film scores. Just before we pulled out, a book on Payne's Find history was passed up into the bus for me, with his thanks.

As I departed, I reflected that the harshness and beauty of the bush country echo the journey of a string player's odyssey with her instrument. My life map certainly reveals that the violin demands much but gives much in return. In any case, I felt at home there, though almost nothing resembled anything I had seen before. On the final evening several kangaroos presented themselves at a distance, slouched in a field, grazing at twilight.

GREAT FENCES OF AUSTRALIA
A project from Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor in 2002/4.

When Peter Gabriel recorded the haunting music for the film Rabbit Proof Fence, the most obvious instrument to use was staring him in the face--the fence. You can play a five-wire fence with no barbs and the music will carry a kilometre along the fenceline, according to experimental string musician Jon Rose, who has just arrived in Brisbane after a 16,000km journey playing, documenting, and in some cases digging up dingo, rabbit and other fences around the country.--Brisbane Courier-Mail.

For the last 20 years, in addition to his work on and about the violin, Jon Rose has been playing and recording the music of Fences worldwide. Sometimes the wind plays the fence in its natural state, but most times the fences are played with violin bows. A wide range of atmospheric music can be coaxed from these ubiquitous landmarks.

The project GREAT FENCES OF AUSTRALIA maps the vast spaces of the fifth continent. Over 2002/4, violinists Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor are playing and recording the unique sounds of hundreds of fences in every state and territory of Australia including the well-known 'dog fence' and 'rabbit proof fences.' Along with this audio material, the lives and histories of the people who build, look after, or use the fences are also being documented. The sounds of their voices and a selection of the digital photos are incorporated in the various outcomes of this project.

The first manifestation of Great Fences was hosted by The Melbourne Festival under the title BOWING FENCES. Jon and Hollis performed over 60 times on the stringy bark and piano wire fence installed in the Victorian Arts Centre Gallery. THE WINTON FENCE, a specially designed structure based on the principles of Just Intonation and the Fibonacci series, is designed by Jon to be powered (Aeolian style) by strong winds as well as bowed. An installation and series of fence performances supported by a major grant from the Australia Council for the Arts is planned for January 2004. There will be a radiophonic version and a web site commissioned by the ABC and a CD with full colour booklet produced in Australia by Dynamo House (www.dynamoh.com.au) and by ReR (London).

The fence represents all kinds of manmade endeavours and disasters. Fences arrived with the end of the hunter-gatherer way of life and the introduction of agriculture. The invention of steel cable in the nineteenth century gave the fence its present distance-warping characteristics. Fences can be seen as analogies for the old battle between our species and nature, for the desire of exploration, control, and exploitation of resources; they indicate a frontier history of extreme hardship. They also mark the close physical association of man with his environment, the notion of belonging, the boundaries of cultures and political systems, a sense of the private and public, a statement that says "I exist." The fence today is even used to protect the natural world from our own excesses.

In Australia, fences are a very new addition to the environment. Certainly they were being erected within months of white settlement. While flying over the most isolated parts of the Australian interior, one notices the existence of fences often with their service tracks beside them. Why on earth are they there? Who put them there? How long did it take? Some fences seem so old that they often take on a mantel of defensive invincibility. But all fences are in fact transitory, finite. Even the longest fence in the world, the so-called dingo fence of Australia, will eventually succumb to nature despite the efforts of those who painstakingly and regularly repair it. The geography will survive the history.

Whatever your view of fences, they seem unstoppable, they are everywhere. Like all good mammals marking out their territory, western man defines his world with fences. Some land owners, however, still prefer the watering hole to the fence as a leash on their wandering cattle. And of course fence construction clearly interfered with, if not helped destroy, the Indigenous Australian's nomadic way of life.

Dr. John Pickard, Australia's leading fence-ologist, has estimated that by 1892 there were over 2.7 million kilometers of fences in New South Wales alone, which used up 20 million cut down trees with a worth of $5.6 billion in today's money. He is still working on an estimation of total fencing kilometers for the entire country at the beginning of the new millennium. The numbers will be serious. Fences are by far the most visible artifacts that we have made on this continent. The Dingo fence is the longest man made thing on the planet, twice as long as the Great Wall of China.

Many people look at fences and see not much; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor look and see giant musical string instruments covering a continent. The strings are so long that they become the resonators as well as the triggers for the sound. On straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of meters. The music is ethereal and elemental, incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound); the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world. The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance, boundaries and borders. This, however, is not the songlines, or even the white fella's ironic version of it, but the unexpected and elegiac music of the Australian landscape 'sounding' its recent history. Fence construction has inadvertently given us a means of expressing musically, with a direct physical connection, the whole range of intense emotion tied up with the ownership of the land, from the outback to the backyard.

Visually, Great Fences of Australia provides complex, critical, and humorous indicators of a culture which is often courageous, sometimes fearful, politically myopic, occasionally missing the plot, but strung together with cockeyed optimism.

Consider the ubiquitous corrugated iron fence in its various chronological shades of rust; the primary-coloured fences of the newly rich suburbs which possess all the subtlety of a Legoland layout; the brilliant white salt lakes which devour their fences within a few decades (significantly hard wood posts last much longer than steel wires); and the recently made desert fences of once optimistic pastoralists which often hang in mid-air after the top soil to which they were attached has been blown away.

A whole lexicon of signs are attached to fences, from the inevitable 'keep out' and 'danger' to the entrepreneurial 'pony poo, $2 a bag.' There are fences that clearly don't work so well, hence the tons of deadly 1080 poison liberally spread down the km 5,309 of the 'Dingo Barrier Fence. On the other hand, fences designed to stop enthusiastic tourists falling over the cliffs at The Great Australian Bight appear to have worked well--so far, anyway. Top secret military bases tell you to 'turn around NOW!' before you even reach their perimeter fences; signs across the Nullarbor warn of the dangerous 'unfenced road'; nothing short of an archaeological dig will let you uncover the remains of the Number 1 Rabbit Proof Fence at its termination point on the northern coast of Western Australia. People like to leave things on fences, like lamb skulls, beer bottles, shopping bags, flags, hub caps, flowers, ribbons, underpants, billy cans, etc. Some fences get to be multi-functional; they begin by trying to keep the bunnies out (always too late), then it's the dingoes, then it's the emus, then it's the 4WD tourists.

There are now plastic temporary fences, there are flexi-fences, fences you can see through, fences you can't see until it's too late. Graveyard fences are heavy, they keep the living from the dead or, depending on your point of view, the dead from the living. Railway lines, telegraph lines, pipelines and butterflies often travel down the same route as fences. Some fences just fall over and that's that. Sometimes they get a plaque on a wall if they were famous. There have been murders, suicides by fences. Early boundary riders working in extremely rough conditions on the Rabbit Proof fence were told initially to do it on a push bike! There's the story of an aeroplane flying right through a fence. It's true--people don't notice fences; but some people object to them; most Aboriginal people are opposed to them; asylum seekers agree. Barbed wire fences never go out of fashion.

There is a painting of a fence on a wall. Fence posts without any wire look lonely. It's difficult to imagine horses running around a race course without a fence. Like guitars, there are electric fences; one finds chain fences, rope fences, rubber tube fences, fences made out of sacking, fences made from hub caps and tyres. In Alice Springs there is a fence theme park. All swimming pools must have a fence by law. 'Beware of the dog' behind the fence. Is there anything more existentialist than an empty plastic bag caught up by the wind and left fluttering hopelessly on a barbed wire fence?

There are a whole range of user-friendly plants that grow over fences; there are fences that go through termite mounds, a tree even; fences that actually pass through other fences; watch out for the fence with scare crow; don't miss the scary gothic fence; fences with fungi; new trees planted for civic pride get a fence around them for protection against the menacing public; the socially side-lined like to write on fences--sometimes it becomes official art; birds, like politicians, are comfortable sitting on the fence; camels like to rub their necks on fences; snails cannot keep away from fences; spiders find them great places to build webs; unrelieved men, if they cannot find a bush, will use a fence; AND where exactly does the Dingo Fence end in Queensland? We haven't found two locals who will agree on that.

www.jonroseweb.com
www.hollistaylor.com

HOLLIS TAYLOR: SOLO, DUO, QUARTETTO

Used to be violinist Hollis Taylor's goal was "to demolish the distinction between high art and folk art." So thoroughly has her work extended the range of the violin that Taylor doesn't need to break down barriers anymore--she has already accomplished it.--Lynn Darroch, The Oregonian.

Notes from violinist/composer/arranger Jon Rose:
The relationship between the violin and jazz has rarely been either interesting or musically compelling. Joe Venuti showed that technique mattered and Stuff Smith demonstrated how to dig the bow in till it hurt. Both offered some melodic invention. There are other examples but you can count them on one hand. Then in 1958 along came Harry Lookofsky with the definitive violin bebop album. It was called 'Stringsville' and it set the bar very high for anybody trying to follow. That album gave me many sleepless nights when I first heard it in the 1970's--how could anybody play the violin that good on jazz standards?

Later, I discovered that, although the music went at full tilt, sounded loose, and swung like crazy, all the violin lines were written. Harry was a classical violinist (actually leader of the NBC orchestra), loved jazz, and wanted to bring his abilities to that music.

Wind the clock forward a decade and we find another classically-trained violinist with a superb technique setting herself the challenge of bringing her musicality and skills (not to mention perfect pitch) to the service of American vernacular music--or non-classical vioin music. Hollis Taylor has spent much of the last 25 years researching, arranging, and writing about the various fiddle traditions which are so rich and dynamic throughout the States. Part of her work has dealt with the problems of how to play jazz on the violin. Let's be more succinct. How to play lines that move across the beat, how to put 'time' into the bow stroke, how NOT to use the incontinent vibrato of the standard Juilliard training (but use it as decoration similar to the baroque aesthetic), how to phrase a bop line and be hard and precise (the opposite of a Grappelli phrase, for example).

Much of Ms. Taylor's investigation into the practice (then the theory please) of 'bowed jazz' has made her a sought-after teacher for both amateur and professional violinists wishing to explore the 'other' music. When I was informed that she planned to put a string quartet together of classical players playing jazz as repertoire, I jumped at the chance of arranging some 'classic' jazz standards for the project.

Notes from Hollis Taylor:
Leibniz, Bach's contemporary, formulated a definition of music that seems appropriate for this concert: "Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a soul unconscious that it is calculating." Our program of contemporary string music celebrates rhythm and counterpoint--the rhythmic palettes of jazz (including various Caribbean beats) and folk dance music (such as the complex meters which surprised Bartok and Kodaly when they were collecting in the previous century) and counterpoint which reached its height in the Baroque era. My solo violin arrangements of jazz standards echo Bach's lavish use of multiple stopping to sustain a complete polyphonic texture and his exploitation of polyphonic melody, in which a single line is made to suggest a fuller texture by constantly shifting between voices: the melody, the harmony, and the bass line, for example. The solo works are the opposite from my previous CD Box Set, for now I have jazz set in a Baroque template.

The duos are from my CD Unsquare Dances and based on European folk dance music in compound meters such as 11/8, 5/4, and 7/8. I collected tunes in 1993-94 during travels throughout Europe and Morocco, then gave them a generous twist in 1995 while living in Budapest. While some pieces may not have originated on violin, this kind of alchemy finds the violin a perfect meeting point, the folk crucible par excellence and expressive medium for such music. Having been re-constituted, they no longer seek nor will they accept the ethnomusicologist's stamp of authenticity. Originally scored for two violins, I re-arranged some favorites as violin/viola duos, even trios and quartets.

My jazz quartet compositions and arrangements (and those of Jon Rose) rely on through-composition but with a bit of improvisation. Counterpoint figures highly into the mix. You might think of some of this music as the jazz that never was.