Greetings Thawing Beings!
The 25th song in the Plant Songs Project is titled Merging.
I was improvising on Saturday and found the idea of what is heard in the introduction. Very quickly the melody came to me - kind of a minimalist theme with lots of space. I liked it.
As I found the rest of the song a form emerged that I could describe as a Rondo form and/or a modified blues form. The form of this song actually brought to mind a comparison of the two that had never occurred to me before.
Someone told me once that Herbie Hancock said that all songs could be boiled down to either the blues form or the Rhythm changes form. For those that are unfamiliar, Rhythm Changes refers to the harmonic structure of George Gershwin’s song I Got Rhythm. There are hundreds of melodies in the jazz canon written over the I Got Rhythm chord progression, which we refer to as“Rhythm Changes”. It’s an AABA form. So all the AABA songs out there might be compared to Rhythm Changes.
When you look at the basic harmonic structure of the 12-bar blues form, you have the following: I - IV - I - V - I. If you call the I chord “A”, the IV chord “B”, and the V chord “C”, then we have ABACA form, which is like a mini Rondo form. Rondo form is essentially ABACADA…on and on as long as you want. Basically you’re returning to an original theme over and over again with sections of different material between that theme.
This is the form of Merging; rondo form, but also a stretched out blues form. Measures 1 to 16 represent I and A, measures 17-21 represent IV and B, 22-29 I (A), 30-43 V (C), and 44-51 I (A). All together it’s ABACA.
I agree with Herbie. It’s fun to look a song and see how it resembles a blues or a rhythm changes. Sonata form is ABA and traditionally that first A is repeated, so AABA. A traditional performance of a jazz song is melody, solos, melody. The melody could represent A, the solos B (the development), and the return to the melody is A again, so ABA, not to far off. The only exception I can easily think of are the great American songbook tunes that are in two large sections, like Just Friends, or There Will Never Be Another You. Maybe these came out of Binary form, which was commonly used in the Baroque period of classical music..
I remember hearing a solo piano concert by Matthew Shipp in which he played a rendition of My Funny Valentine. He played 8 bars of the theme, then improvised freely, then the next 8 bars of the theme, then improvised, on and on. It occurred to me that he was doing a Rondo form, which was kind of rare in jazz. The friend I was with found it annoying, but I found it intriguing. It got me thinking, and a couple years later I would compose and record Bagatelles For Trio, which was largely about taking classical forms and applying them to jazz. The fourth Bagatelle is in Rondo form.
Back to Merging. I had recently been thinking about how life involves a lot of “merging”. Ten years ago we “merged” with life in Beacon, NY. Other friends were also merging with Beacon life right at the same time. Others had merged with it a few years earlier. They allowed us in, and we became part of the community. Some have exited Beacon life now and moved away, and many more have merged with it in more recent years. I’ve recently merged strongly with the Mount Beacon ecosystem, establishing my hiking habit and getting to know that ecosystem while it gets to know me. My wife Akiko and I merged together back in 2004 and we really merged hard, so much that we’ve remained side by side on the road of life for 21 years now. And our daughter Miya rapidly merged with our lives in 2019 and is right now in the stage of being very close and dependent. Later she will become more independent and go farther away, but will still be merged with us in some way. My piano students merge with me, some for ten or twelve years before they exit and merge into the next stage of their lives. Different communities such as my music major friends at UW-Eau Claire, my Manhattan School of Music friends, the sub scene of the NYC jazz scene that I was a part of, and the eco/gardening scene of Beacon, and many more, can all be viewed as mergings. Some last longer than others, but they all have left a mark. I am who I am today because of all of these periods of merging into different communities for a time. I merged into conscious life on Earth, and I will exit eventually. It’s nice being here on Earth at this time - pretty cool to be on this planet at the same time as pianos, for example. I could go on and on with this, and I will as I go about my days, until something merges into my life that needs some immediate attention for a time.
I hope you enjoy Merging. Thanks for being with me.