Method Sampling and the emergence of new systems 1/n
“at the beginning two entirely different stories, apparently without any relationship with each other, progressively become intertwined and merge, until at the end they make up only one theme.”
— Claude Lévi-Strauss (Myth & Meaning)
Exordium
To start this discussion, it would be best to go back to the beginning, as the arguments put forth in this article and going forward heavily rest on my personal experience as a foreigner with drastically different cultural norms from that of American/European as well as fundamental disparities in linguistic structures between Korean and English languages. In “translating” these differences, I have come to realize that there are “principles” embedded within a culture/system that are independent from the customs that were habitually practiced and inherited, yet essential in generating the very structure/system. Later, I realized that you can isolate and extract these principles to build a novel system and attempted to do so.
In 1998, our family moved to the U.S. on the insistence of my father who has been living in the States for over a decade by himself. He wanted to have the family live together and aid in his efforts in the newfound Christian religion; he had become a pastor.
At just 20 years old and incredibly agnostic, I was not at all interested nor impressed with his endeavor. This situation was exacerbated by a long time family drama that had been brewing, resulting in a great deal of conflict. Within six months of living in America, I had to find other accommodation.
Fortunately, during this time, I had become acquainted with Hyunoong Sunim, a Korean Zen monk who had a background in both Rinzai Zen and Taoist arts. Once finding out about my precarious situation, he invited me to live at the temple in Berkeley, CA.
For the next seven years, I lived at the temple cooking and cleaning in exchange for room and board, as well as practicing both Zen meditation and Taoist internal alchemy. Concurrently, I was studying musical composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, returning back to the Bay Area in between semesters. After graduating from Berklee, I took a year off, then completed my master’s at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, also in composition.
Without a doubt, this experience of living with a real master and training under him informed and influenced my writing in an essential way. The practices I’ve learned from the temple are completely integrated into my daily life. Even now, almost everyday, I do the Taoist breathing meditation for an hour or two, zazen, and sustaining an attitude of detachment — an integral part of Zen training. In time, these cross training in composition, Taoist meditation, and Zen led me to a series of discoveries and insights that culminated in the crystallization of Method Sampling.
But first, I’d like to mention another aspect that profoundly transformed my outlook on musical composition.
An unrelated story — Jazz
Berklee College of Music was unique in that it was aesthetically omnivorous in its educational approach. For instance, the students not only studied traditional harmony but also had to learn jazz harmony as part of the core curriculum. In fact, if I remember correctly, jazz harmony was called “harmony” and the classical harmony course, “tonal harmony and composition”. Some other conservatories did have jazz programs (often separately from the classical offerings) but it is my understanding that no other institutions required all the students to take jazz harmony courses regardless of their major.
This heavy emphasis on popular music and jazz irritated me as I felt it was a hindrance to my goal of being an adept concert composer. My focus at the time was singularly on learning every single compositional technique and studying classical repertoires. There were excellent teachers at Berklee who taught traditional composition, classical piano, conducting, and other standard conservatory subjects. Many of them were very happy to see an enthusiastic student in me and often spent extra time to elucidate subtle points of the craft. You might ask why I chose a known jazz school to study classical composition. During this period, my goal was to become a successful film composer and make a boat load of money. In my mind, Berklee College of Music was one of the best places to prepare me for this specific purpose. What I also thought was, that in order to be an excellent film composer, one must first be a proficient concert composer.
Regardless of what I wanted to concentrate on, one had to go through the required courses in order to graduate from Berklee. Therefore, I had to continuously take the “harmony” courses and other obligatory jazz/popular music classes. This was definitely not pleasant but I got progressively comfortable with them.
As I became more acclimated to jazz harmony, I noticed an interesting aspect within the system. It looks at each chord and the tensions (upper tones which can be stacked up in thirds: 9th, 11th & 13th) like they form a separate mode (musical scale). In addition to thinking within a key the music is in, jazz treats each chord as if it has its own unique key area. Its effect can be especially striking if the player inserts alterations in the the upper tones while improvising (i.e. b9, #11… etc.). Now, this way of improvising doesn’t always result in vast differences in the analysis of the harmony. In fact, it generally lands itself within the frame of tonal music that can be explained via traditional (classical) theory. However, this also often renders odd or anomalous results compared to, say, Baroque improvisation based on a parallel format*. *In classical music, there’s a device called “figured bass” which is basically a very square, Euro version of what jazz people call “lead sheet”, an abbreviated master score that musicians use to improvise.
The aforementioned feature in jazz is called “chord scales”. And it is important. Not only is it important because chord scales and their application through improvisation give jazz the unique characteristics that it’s recognized for but also important that it reveals a distinctive structural idea on modulations (changing of keys/modes); an independent key area is being superimposed onto individual chords.
Take a look at the penultimate measure of the lead sheet example, All of Me. On the third & fourth beats, Eb diminished chord appears. When improvising in the key of C major, which the piece is in, and following the members of Eb Dim. chord (Eb, F#, and A), you’ll get a mode that doesn’t belong in the basic Major/minor scheme of tonal music.
In my opinion, along with the obvious differentiating factor of complex/syncopated rhythms, chord scales and their implication of atomized key areas to the corresponding chords, is an essential element that renders the genre of jazz its systematic integrity. I’m well aware that some of the readers might think of improvisation itself as a unique element that makes jazz, jazz. Nevertheless, improvisation is a common feature almost ubiquitous in many other genres of music. What’s more important is how you improvise or what kind of mechanism/principle is deployed in causing such an improvisation to occur (i.e. differences in improvisations of jazz vs. Baroque vs. Indian music).
The significance of this small realization of a principle embedded in jazz music wasn’t clear to me at the time. What was clear was that it was strange. To explain the chord scale totally within the system of tonal harmony would be something like this — it grows out of key areas/modes and is reframed to be applied to the level of chord. That is, the macro principle of keys/modes is extracted and implemented onto the microstructure of chords. This reframing would be extremely unlikely to be done in classical music, as it breaks a number of rules of tonal harmony and challenges the first principles within the system to a breaking point. Or another way to put it would be that the insertion of chord scale pushes the tonal system to change into another entity.
By the time jazz emerged, tonal music and its harmonic rules had long been established and accepted as a law, a canon which went through more than three centuries of refinement by a number of geniuses in composition and theory. This makes the tonal harmony a closed system that has arrived at its evolutionary peak à la “End of History”. Whether the basis of chord scale in jazz comes from the parallelism of Debussy* or a misunderstanding of the key areas and their usages within the tonal system is a question of musicology/ethnomusicology, I’m not qualified to answer. *Incidentally, Debussy’s floating harmonic parallelism which triggered the 20th century/modern music was inspired by Gamelan music he encountered at the 1889 Paris Expo.
What I can say with a reasonable assurance is that chord scale, be it originated from Debussy or misunderstanding, is an inherently “foreign” element that requires a new explanation and ultimately, a new system.
Oh, and lastly, to give you a little context on what ended up happening with this realization and subsequent evolution of it, see below.
To be continued
