COOK Referential Sets Referential Tonics and the Analysis Of
REFERENTIAL SETS, REFERENTIAL TONICS, AND THE ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY JAZZ by Scott Alexander Cook B.Mus, McGill University, 2004 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2006 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Music) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2012 © Scott Alexander Cook, 2012 ABSTRACT While jazz has become more integrated into academia, the repertoire that is commonly examined is out of date. Today's leading jazz scholars tend to focus on a handful of musicians who made their mark in the '50s and '60s. But jazz writing has continued to evolve in the last fifty years, particularly in regards to harmony. Though many rooted chords—including MM7, mm7, and Mm7—can be heard in succession, the relationships between adjacent chords are obscure, and rarely manifest the standard II–V–I progression found in classic jazz. Often, successive chords belong to different diatonic sets. Some composers have eliminated chord symbols from their lead sheets altogether, leaving harmonic interpretation and relationships even more open-ended. Since the inception of modal jazz in the late '50s, priority has been given to groups of notes and the ways that they can interact, as opposed to specific chords, keys, and function. This presents a challenge not only for harmonic analysis but also for improvising on these changes in performance. Nevertheless, pitch-class organization can often be heard to promote a hierarchical ranking amongst the chords, resulting in strong points of reference. This dissertation develops and applies a theory of referential sets, for analyzing and improvising over representative examples of chromatic chord successions found in some contemporary jazz.
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