Zac Zinger - Cerberus

SCORE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE: https://zaczinger.com/scores From my debut album, "Fulfillment," out now! This piece received the 2014 ASCAP Johnny Mandel Prize and an ASCAP Young Composer Award. For all the music theory nerds out there, see the full explanation of my compositional process below. Instagram: @zaczinger Facebook:   / zaczingermusic   Website: https://www.zaczinger.com/ Bandcamp: https://zaczinger.bandcamp.com/ iTunes/Apple Music: https://apple.co/2Mw3HMh Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2M8J4Xx Google Play: https://bit.ly/2IJxVtZ Written, arranged, mixed and produced by Zac Zinger. Alto Sax - Zac Zinger Piano - Sharik Hasan Bass - Adam Neely Drums - Luke Markham Recording Engineer/Videographer - Alessio Romano Recorded at Studio 42 in Brooklyn, NY.    / studio42brooklyn   Mastered by Satoshi Mark Noguchi Now, for the moment a handful of you have been waiting for: This piece was born out of the observation that much of traditional jazz harmony is based on cyclic motion around the circle of fourths and stepwise motion; for example, II-7 -- V7 -- Ima7 and Ima7 -- II-7 -- I6 -- IVma7. I hypothesized that it might open some new avenues of exploration if I omitted completely the use of cyclic and stepwise motion in the root motion of the harmony for an entire through-composed piece. Thus, the listener will find that the root motion of each chord change is based solely on minor and major 3rds and 6ths, with the occasional tritone. As an additional challenge, I decided to omit consecutive 3rds and 6ths from all of the melodic lines in all of the parts, including the bass. I found this to be an especially difficult task in the bass part since it mostly follows the root motion of the chords, which, thanks to my initial limitation, consisted mostly of 3rds and 6ths. Due to the importance of the number three in my concept, the piece received the name “Cerberus,” after the legendary Greek three-headed dog. Two essential characteristics of the piece were immediately established by these limitations. First, I would need to use non-functional harmony for everything. Second, the melody would need to be either very linear with stepwise motion or angular with fourth and fifth motion, as it would not be possible to arpeggiate the majority of the chords in the melody. Through my experimentation, I found it was possible to reach most harmonic targets within one or two chord changes, and with logical patterns accompanying them. For example, starting at :35 I wanted to have a chromatically descending bass line to accompany the chromatically descending melody. I was able to do this while maintaining the limitations by alternating the root motion between major thirds and minor thirds but connecting the target bass notes with passing tones. The chord qualities were then filled in on a trial & error basis. I did not expect that thinking of harmony in this way would yield such agile motion, but it was a liberating discovery. Improvised solos were originally intended to omit consecutive thirds as well, but it was found to stifle spontaneous creativity rather than catalyze it. There are a select few moments where I felt it was necessary to break the rules I set for myself. If you find one, post the timing in the comments and I’ll justify it! Whether or not this experiment was a successful one is up to each listener, but on the whole I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. The idea of using/omitting the number three as the conceptual basis of an entire piece still has much to be explored (vertical harmony without thirds, no groups of three notes throughout a piece, etc.), but I yield these discoveries to a more ambitious composer of the future. Speaking solely on the results of this controlled experiment, I can conclude that harmony does not need to be limited to cyclic and stepwise motion, nor are thirds a necessary component of a melody.