Well, it's difficult to discuss this math/music issue in a just a comment-length mini-essay and manage to get at what I'm trying to convey. I didn't write the "nonsense" comment myself, but i do hear the legit and justified frustration in it. Sketches of Spain- beautiful. Xenakis though. Man, every time I have had to perform one of his pieces, I'm thinking I should be paid double or they should just hook a digital sound making device up to his score so they don't have to pay anyone to practice that stuff! I guess some people enjoy it? He is the perfect example of what I was trying to get at. Does he have ideas? I guess so...? Do i need to practice them? Um, only if I get paid double/triple for the gig. Know what I mean? It isn't that I'm saying that musicians don't ever practice this way or compose using these devices. Tons of jazz musicians sit around with Slonimsky, mathing their way to a technique in improv that is truly justified by labor. People do it. It is a bit ridiculous. There is a pianist here in NYC who does this- she's a fantastic pianist and composer without Slonimsky and the like. She has compositional ideas and stylistic ones. I will say she is a cold player, but she's battling it out in a tough shark tank, so I get that she feels she has to join the arms race. I'm just saying that the musicians/composers I admire most focus on the human communication, style, and content aspect of improv and the aspect of music that comments upon culture and also inspires cultural change and reflection. Nuance. in As a young musician, I was forced to practice this thinky-mathy way for various professors. With age comes the perspective and mercy I hope to show my students and colleagues when I don't spend our valuable practice and rehearsal time on retrograde-inversions and the set of combinatorial relationships in a given collection, i.e. things that don't sound like much (except to a music theorist who studied serialism and 12-tone) but are justified by practice room labor. I'm definitely not trying to claim that there aren't musicians that go down this path-- there certainly are! Famous ones, even! For me though, it's is a flag waving frantically that loudly signals a lack of artistic content, usually. But not always, as I said. This is only my opinion, however. I voiced it because there aren't enough musicians/teachers/composers who voice this pushback against the macho-mathy in jazz. There is this fallacy that anyone who can't play all mathy w the Slonimsky snippets weaving in and out of their improv should not be listened to when they say, "hey! why are we practicing this stuff??? I'm not a computer! I'm an artist-human!" I'm just saying some of us don't feel bullied (not saying you are doing that-you were just raising a legit point) and we feel perfectly fine calling out this approach for its mad dash to cover up for a severe lack of artistic content and a fear that one is vulnerable to being unseated from the throne.
I'd say jazz is really suffering from a lack of artistic content right now, and I believe it's a direct result of years of this kind of prove-your-mathy-badassery-technical-arms-race among jazz musicians. This is what happens when an "island is sinking"- people start pushing others off the sinking island so there is room for themselves. Jazz (and classical) is kinda sinking. Hopefully we can heal from this and get away from analogue versions of computer music (Xenakis) and back to humanity soon. It's funny, the defense against the sinking is causing it to sink faster by being less human, less relevant. Ironic.
But I sure didn't say that people don't get all up into the math of interrelationships in music theory. They do- I would hate for a non-musician to think they had to do that though to understand music. Absolutely not!In fact, I'm just saying that isn't what music is about for me, as a composer-musician. (I want to encourage people to love music, not to feel bullied by the 'difficulty" of its theory)
also: you said, "...He wasn't Thelonious Monk who just played everything in the hardest keys to prove how great he was on piano..."
What? I don't think that's what Monk was doing at all! Monk developed a sonic language all his own. I don't think any keys were hard for him... nor are they for any professional musician. Monk thought in sound texture and color. They are just different sounds. Sometimes you need a freshness or a timbre that a special key provides. Enough jazz music is written in B-flat if you know what I mean.