Jazz Musicianship

A staple of the Walden School curriculum since 2001, Jazz Musicianship builds on the foundations and draws upon the philosophies of The Walden School Musicianship Course to form a fully comprehensive jazz method. The course may best be understood analogously as a set of pathways that lead from the harmonic series to the surface of the jazz language in all its diverse utterances, from the blues to the avant-garde and everything in between. This design allows for an organic learning process, each piece of new territory connecting smoothly to ground already explored. The faculty facilitate situations where students can discover each new concept for themselves. Once discovered, concepts are drilled in a variety of ways involving singing, playing, movement, games, reading, writing, and listening. Lastly, students apply materials creatively, using written composition as a stepping stone toward improvisation. Throughout the course, each student thus develops a lexicon of personal material that is constantly expanding (an invaluable resource for cultivating a unique musical voice). Engaging creativity at all levels of the learning process in this way also serves as a healthy counterbalance for the rich study of the work of the jazz masters.

The course has three main parts. Part One explores fundamentals of the jazz language, covering concepts such as the seventh chord as consonance, voice leading as the meeting place between melody and harmony, models of melodic chromaticism, harmonic extensions, the symbiosis of harmony and scale, basic harmonic relationships (via cycles of fifths and thirds), and scales built from fifths (i.e. the pentatonic and Lydian modal systems). Part Two explores functional harmony in major and minor keys, presenting a multi-layered hierarchy of harmonic relationships. Part Three explores materials that extend beyond the domain of functional harmony, including associative harmony, bitonality, quartal harmony, symmetrical divisions of the octave, and free atonality. ALTHOUGH materials are presented with respect to their evolution in the jazz tradition, many of these concepts have wider application(s) and are likely to be of interest to inquiring musicians of any stripe.

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