Dancing in His Head: The Evolution of Ornette Coleman's Music and Compositional Philosophy

[摘要] Ornette Coleman (1930-2015) is frequently referred to as not only a great visionary in jazz music but asalso the father of the jazz avant-garde movement. As such, his work has been a topic of discussion fornearly five decades among jazz theorists, musicians, scholars and aficionados. While this music was oncecontroversial and divisive, it eventually found a wealth of supporters within the artistic community and hasbeen incorporated into the jazz narrative and canon. Coleman’s musical practices found their greatestacceptance among the following generations of improvisers who embraced the message of 'free jazz” as anatural evolution in style. Performers such as Jamaaladeen Tacuma, David Murray, Pat Metheny and JohnZorn incorporated the techniques of spontaneous group improvisation and what Coleman described as'harmolodic” organization into their own performance.This dissertation traces Coleman’s rise from relative obscurity to a place of greater celebrity in jazzand other musical circles. Coleman’s acceptance by the academy, other composers, notable jazz musicians,and the public is discussed in terms of how these shifts were made, and in what ways Coleman—who oftenfelt victimized and mistreated by record company executives, critics, and musical establishments—transcended the gaps in his musical training in order to create his own distinctive and influentialcompositional style. This 'harmolodic theory” was then refined over a period of nearly 55 years.vThe work discusses harmolodics in detail by building on the taxonomic models described byEkkard Jost and Peter N. Wilson. It describes the variations in compositional practice as Coleman’s styleevolved from 1980 until his death in 2015. The analysis supplements transcriptions and harmonic analyseswith spectrograms and waveforms in order to illuminate specific areas of Coleman’s work. These graphicrepresentations clarify observations made through transcription and reinforce some of the conceptsembodied in Coleman’s unique philosophy of music.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh