During the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, western composers have used various traditional forms to structure their works. For example, each dance of a Baroque suite had its own rhythmic character and tempo. The sonata form affected composers until the twentieth century, adapting the traditional form to a new musical language. In Jazz music, the tendency to write music following forms borrowed from the past is really popular. The structure, that we can find in a lot of Big Band pieces, formed by an intro, exposition, development and recapitulation with the “shout chorus” (in which the whole ensemble plays the theme or a special) has classical reminiscences (e.g. certain aspects ABA-form). Moreover, if we consider the main Jazz repertoire (e.g. Standards from Real Books) we can also say that almost all the compositions are based on pre-defined forms (e.g. blues, 16/32 bar form, rhythm change form, etc.).
Except “free Jazz” in which the player, starting from a concept has the freedom to develop his musical thinking only through improvisation, in Jazz there is still the tendency to write music starting from rules, such as pre-defined chord progressions or fixed forms. As a composer I found it interesting to find a way to open the traditional use of form in Jazz, and I decided to investigate on how it is possible to relate the aspects of musical narration to the aspects of form. The question that led me to find answers and start this journey was:
How can I relate the aspects of form in my groove-related music by analyzing the aspects of musical narration?
This allowed me to open the traditional way of writing groove-related music, rethinking the use of the constructive approach in writing in “groove”. The use of narrative approach was also a pretext to reflect on the representation of meanings into music, and I included in
my research some reflections about the role of musical perception.
The concept behind the musical narration defines the form, and the narrative approach opened me to a variety of possibilities to develop musical material in my composition. The constructive approach used to build up the groove (at a Micro level) can be implemented with the narrative approach (at a Macro level).