Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX
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I think there's something to be added to today's excellent comments, especially from Knussen. There are interesting side issues (or maybe not so side) when it comes to evaluating the jazz/classical crossover Schuller initiated with his third stream in the 1950s. In some ways the execution of the ideas was premature if looked at from a purist (e.g. serial) perspective because of the way in which atonality ( as consolidated by serialism breaks up rhythmic continuities because of its undermining of the "fundamentalist" cadence (the dominant -> tonic "a-men" resolution that dominates music from about 1600 to 1900 and still of course does pop music by rounding it off)). Four hundred plus years of the Western ear's enharmonic indictrination to "hear" resolutions even when they're not there in the music predisposes one to prejudice atonal and-or serial music structured on regular rhythmic patterns in this direction, unless the mind's ineluctable linking of theoretically non-existent rhythmic cycles (associated with tonal-directed phrasing) to harmonic resolution is as it were countermanded by absence of tonal associations within the harmonies - which is the case, if one takes as example "Le marteau sans maitre", in which the composer Boulez reintroduced pulse regularity back into serialised musical procedures, but not in the case of much of Schuller's serial/third stream jazz/classical crossover pieces, in which the thinking is harmonically closer to that of Alban Berg, a composer Schuller identified with, whose music, even when using tone rows, always retained that "just over the frontier from the world of keys" that made his music the most appealing of the trinity to many who find the Second Viennese school's music hard to take. All of which has a bearing when we come onto later adapters and extenders of the third stream principle such as Anthony Braxton or our own Simon Fell, whose most radically advanced pieces, by brooking no compromise with trappings of traditional practice, have made them controversial figures on either side of any putative classical/jazz "divide".
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