Improvising with Arrays

Abstract

My early training was in jazz, but in the late 1980s and 1990s I developed a passion for the music of Milton Babbitt, and as a result of immersing myself in his language and techniques, developed a set of improvisational-compositional concepts based on Babbitt-style pitch-class arrays. These experiments were a means of developing my own personal musical style and ‘sound’ as a composer within a jazz context, and I worked on the ideas with jazz musicians who were grounded in a shared bebop and post-bop vocabulary. For this double issue dedicated to Babbitt, I was prompted to write this article, which retrospectively gathers and details some of the techniques I developed at that time. In reviewing the wealth of materials (charts, sketches, diagrams, scores, arrays) I had generated during those years, it became clear that I had opened many paths and directions for array improvisation that remain only incompletely explored, with further work to be done, as my own artistic path evolved in other directions. This article provides a preliminary and partial account of these array-based improvisational-compositional concepts.

Keywords:

• Improvisation
• Arrays
• Jazz
• Serialism
• The Bad Plus
• Ethan Iverson

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.2017156.

Notes

1 This is demonstrated in rich detail in Mailman (2019, 2020).

2 Dubiel (1991, 1992) touches on this in his Three Essays.

3 Mead (1987, 1988, 1994)

4 Mailman’s (2019) video trilogy and (2020) ‘Portmantonality’ article each, in different ways, explores some analogies between jazz chord changes and Babbitt arrays.

5 This classification is retrospective; at the time I was merely exploring array improvisation in as many ways as I could think of.

6 ‘Sand’ from Explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYwyes3MpI.

7 The philosophical underpinnings of Babbitt’s thinking—in prioritizing empirically verifiable statements for instance-- have seemed anti-metaphysical, which contrasts with the more metaphysical sources of my own practice.

8 A 4²31 partition means that two lynes present four ordered pitches each, one lyne presents three ordered pitches, and another lynes presents a single pitch.

9 The entire recording of this solo rendition of Array of Light can be heard in three audio files supplied as Supplementary Material to this article.

10 ‘Three Dreams of Repose’ from Shores of Silence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB6Qsf7A1OQ.

11 Submersion I from Twelve Sacred Dances can be heard here: https://youtu.be/1MDRGC5ND0M.

12 This excerpt (bb. 14–17 of Twelve Sacred Dances’ Introit II, in the final repeat) can be heard here: https://youtu.be/kKUdCAJJk6o?t=267. See Iverson (2015) for more on this.

13 ‘Sand’ can be heard here: https://youtu.be/uKYwyes3MpI.

14 Although recent work of Mailman (2019, 2020) hints that there may have been more commonalities between my approach and Babbitt’s than I—or anyone else—realized.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Zimmerli

Patrick Zimmerli’s latest CD Sun on Sand, with Joshua Redman and Brooklyn Rider, was released on Nonesuch Recordings in 2019. It features music premiered at Wigmore Hall in 2014. It marks his third collaboration with Nonesuch, following Modern Music, for pianists Kevin Hays and Brad Mehldau, and Redman’s Walking Shadows. Since Zimmerli won the first Thelonious Monk Composers Competition in 1993, he has worked with many leading jazz and classical musicians, recording over 20 CDs. Recent large-scale projects include Clockworks, (CMA Commission 2017); and the Oratorio Alan Seeger: Instrument of Destiny (premiere Les Invalides, Paris 2017, Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York 2019).