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HARMOLODICS:
thoughts this way and that

Andrew Poppy

Revised introduction for the School of Harmolodics as part of Ornette Coleman’s

Meltdown Festival, South Bank Centre London 14-20 June 2009

It’s a privilege to be invited by Meltdown Festival 2009 to

help run The School of Harmolodics week of workshops.

I am some kind of contemporary composer rather than an

improviser. And what improvising I do, does not instantly
connect to the bop, post bop tradition that is the starting
point of Ornette Coleman’s music. But probably that’s why
I’ve been invited to be here; to be the wild card in a team
of artistic leaders with Chris Batchelor and Julian Seigel
who are such wonderful improvisers and whose music has
more of a family connection to Ornette’s work. And the
team also includes Alice Tatge’s making a dance and
movement response to the Harmolodic idea.

What I want to contribute here is a sense of context. To

see Harmolodics as connected to ideas in other areas of
music and performance, both historically and personally.

Harmolodics: how does it work? Looking at various

explanations by Ornette Coleman himself and members of
his various bands it would seem to be a spirit or attitude
as much as it a method.

There are some innovative technical inventions for sure,

such as the Harmolodic clef. This is an interesting
strategy. It’s a way of instantly building chromatically
inflected harmonic fields within a predominately
melodically articulated style.

Perhaps Harmolodics is an example of an approach to

creativity which organises one parameter while trying to
be un-mindful of another to which it is intimately
connected. The relationship of harmony to melody and
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harmony to melody is particular in Ornettte Colemans

style. The later is articulated whist the former is implied.
As Wilfred Mellers says in his still resonant book ‘Music In
A New Found Land’(1964)

“…. the first musician who has carried further some

of the implication of Parker’s line and rhythm….
Ornette Coleman achieved this stylistic development
by paring harmonic texture to a minimum: by
discarding the piano as a harmony instrument and
exporing, more radically than Sonny Rollins, melodic
variation on line, not on chord sequence”

Melody and melodic form are what dominate. And

melodies have always been the more rigorous agents of
control in any musical context. They survive almost
infinite fragmentation and transformation. A harmony or a
texture is much more fragile by comparison and more
specifically located in a particular moment.

We can all sing The Beatles ‘Hard Days Night’ and, if we

have the skill, we can riff and play on the intervals and
shapes of the tune. But the opening chord on the electric
guitar is a unique identity even if we own that particular
Rickenbacker guitar and can voice it correctly. It’s a
unique identity made up of interval structure, chord
voicing, articulation, amplification and recording
technology. Transpose it up a few intervals on the sampler
and its identity is lost.

We can find that fragility in other places. ‘Durations’ by

Morton Feldman where each ‘harmony colour’ is a stated
thing in itself. Melodies are, where you find them, implied.

Harmolodics could be seen as a poetic strategy. Because

trying to explore technical questions further sometimes
dissolves into the mystification and magic of ‘a chord
which cannot be inverted’! But perhaps that’s how it
should be. Strong ideas are often simple and stand alone.
They don’t always need some vast tome to explain them
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like Wagner’s ‘Gesamkuntswerk’ .E=MC2 is a good

example of a big idea expressed with economy.
Harmolodics in some ways is more useful to think of as a
an attitude. Ornette is ambitious for his idea to be more
then just a musical technique. He says:

"Harmolodics can be used in almost any kind of

expression. You can think harmolodically. You can
write fiction and poetry in harmolodic. Harmolodic
allows a person to use a multiplicity of elements to
express more than one direction at a time."

This is a way in for me as a composer whose own work is

formed and influenced by American experimental and
minimal contemporary classical music of the 1950-60s.

Who was he thinking of when he said “You can write

fiction and poetry in harmolodic”. Certainly listening to
‘Little Symphony’, ‘Peace Warrior’ ,‘Enfant’, ‘Feet Music’,
all sort of connections present themselves.

The novels of Jack Kerouac, where the words rush like ‘Big
Sur’ in endless sentences where the full stop gets pushed
further and further into the future. Or the poetry of Allan
Ginsberg on ‘Howl’, the shaman, where the mesmeric flow
of images tumble over each other suspending the readers
desire to understand what he’s talking about. An invitation
to trance dance in the metaphorical.

And could Harmolodics be in the painting of Jackson

Pollack with its beguiling suggestion of freedom within an
exquisitely choreographed painting action. He dances
while he paints. The painting the memory of that dance.

All these guys put the sense, the image, the experience of
spontaneity as the most importance thing to be
communicated to the audience.

Perhap it’s worth noting at this point that, for the listener,
high modernism, the most rigorously organised total serial
music of Boulez and Stockhausen, also projects an image
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of spontaneity if not arbitrariness for the listener, I’ll come

back to this later

No doubt Kerouac, Ginsberg and Pollack all listened to

Ornette Coleman back then. And given the 6 degrees of
separation rule and the ‘small world‘ cliché of any artistic
scene in any city, you can bet he knew a few of those
guys.

Even before I heard the story that Ornette and Yoko Ono
had been an item I sensed an aesthetic connection in their
approach to performance. Ideas that were new,
sometimes confrontational, but definitely floating free in
the air of 1960s New York.

Fluxus was a movement that originated at that time. A

loose association of artists which embraced may different
modes and players from the proto minimalism of La Mont
Young to the confrontational performance strategies of
Dick Higgins and Yoko One. They developed the
instruction score. Often a single paragraph, sometimes
only a sentence, the score set the frame of a performance
idea.

Danger Music May 1962 by Dick Higgins

Scream! Scream! Scream!

Scream! Scream! Scream!

That’s it. The score doesn’t say how many performers,

how they should be co-ordinated, how it starts, how it
stops. What kind of duration there is between each
‘Scream’ event. All these things are decided either by
negotiation OR NOT and if not these things are decided by
WHAT HAPPENS by the particular quality of the moment
and the thought of the people in the room.
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Yoko Ono’s Laundry Piece 1963

In entertaining your guests bring out your laundry of

the day and explain to them about each item. How
and when it became dirty and why etc’

But getting back to Harmolodics. Harmolodics is a new

word, and as a coinage it says almost all we need to
know. It brings together the word ‘harmony’ and ‘melody’,
the vertical and the horizontal, your space and myspace.
The individual and the group are incoded in the idea.

Perhap it’s what composer John Cage and choreographer

Merc Cunningham explored as their co-existance of forms.
‘Music’ and ‘dance’ or ‘sound’ and movement brought
together, outside of any kind of deterministic framework.

So I think all we need to know is the word, to contemplate

the word and things will fall into place.

Lets talk about school. Perhaps an unfortunate word in

this context. Perhap Harmolodics Lab would be more
useful! This School of Harmolodics could be a number of
things. We may start from Ornette’s tunes but we wont
strive to ape the style in some of a kind of hall of mirrors.
We should aim to be true to the spirit and ourselves and
make something that will be about this particular moment
in 2009. We should continue the spirit and translate the
ideas. As the man said ‘it not about style its an idea’

There is a song lyric by Nick Cave which is interesting to

mention here. It’s called ‘We call upon the author to
explain.’

‘What we once thought we had, we didn't,

and what we have now,
will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain’
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‘Rosary clutched in his hand,

he died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain’

‘He said everything is messed up around here,

everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
against the likes of you and me
in this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain’

Nick Cave sends up of the idea of God in a meaningless

world. But more than this, what Cave satirizes is the
desire for ‘knowledge’, to know; the desire for there to be
a complete method and plan. As we know these things are
always provisional if they exist at all.

We encounter meaninglessness and mystery everyday

and we wonder why we are here and what we are doing
and somehow we get on and do stuff. And in moments of
insecurity and doubt that continually surface we ‘call upon
the author to explain’.

The author has been much theorised since the 1960s. And
the author idea is, in part, a naming game. The word is
great promoter of identity. A herald of something. Or a
wall for the academy to breach.

George Russel has the Lydian Chromatic concept.

Gunter Shuller has Third Stream
Schoenberg had the Method of Composing with 12 tones.
Steve Reich had Music as a Gradual Process.
Cage had Silence. The musical work and title of a book
which made him even more in-famous and was anything
but silent.
Arvo Part has Tintinnabulation.
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Lars Von Tria the Scandinavian film maker has Dogma a

set of rules for the liberation of film making from
postproduction.

Although some authors don’t need any encouragement to

explain, it’s useful to remember that Debussy was against
the idea of being labelled an impressionism. But try going
to a concert of his music or reading a book or record
sleeve without encountering that word

One last stab at the theory.

The idea is that Ornette’s ‘harmony is not something pre-

determined, but emerges from the interaction of the
improvised lines in the ensemble’. And in this situation the
intervallic structure of a line, a melody, is the essential
element.

It’s an idea that echo’s Schoenberg’s serialism. The 12

tone method starts with the organisation of intervals. It
has been trailed in the press as the heroic ‘liberation of
dissonance’. This tells us more about the ideology of the
style. Because most important to Schoeberg’s is his
‘prohibition’ of intervals which suggest triads. Intervals
which have harmonic gravity. Ornette doesn’t have this
agenda but perhaps does feel that melody needs to be
less restricted by a fixed and stated harmonic frame.

John Cage - who with Alan Kaprow invented ‘Happenings’

in the early 1950s influencing the Fluxus movement in the
60s - studied with Schoenberg in his youth. Cage seems
to have understood some of the irony implicit in the serial
method.

The rigorous and mechanical control of one element, the

melodic, tended to have implications for other
parameters. The unforeseen or unintended consequences
were fascinating, more fascinating that what was worked
by the composer. In Schoenberg’s music the rigorous
control of intervallic structure and the resulting lack of
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tonal centre left the rhythmic character in a time warp. An

empty shell without any harmonic motivation.

In Ornette’s approach the idea is that harmony is not

something pre-determined, but arrived at thought the
soloist’s exploration of possibilities in the moment. So the
specifics of the harmony are self determined by the free
playing associations in the band.
Harmony emerges from the interaction of the improvised
lines in the ensemble, but the specifics of the harmonic
results are indeterminate. The melodic is articulated but
the harmony is implied and always moving towards
ambiguity. This is the idea.

Ornette’s harmelodic clef or the strategy of transposing

instrument all reading from the same clef goes quite along
way to making some kind of consistent harmonic world. It
can quickly established a harmonic identity.

Some composers in the middle of the 20th Century were

quick to take Schoenberg’s melodic ideas further by
applying rigorous control to all parameters. Rhythm,
Dynamics and Timbre. However the more the parameters
of composition where rigorously ordered the more the
surface of the work projected some kind of free play. This
seems particularly true of Stockhausen’s music.

Cage on the other hand wanted to play what was

controlled off against what wasn’t. He asked: why not
devote composition and performance energy (control) to
making an experience in which all the sonic events are
unforeseen (uncontrolled) by the composer .

The final stage of this approach, in which both composers

and performer seem redundant, Cage asks: why not just
listen to the sonic events that naturally occur in the world.
To consider for aesthetic experience those things which
are not controlled by us and the specifics of which are
unforeseen. The continuing irony is that to do this Cage
still has to have a score and, in the classic version of
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4’33, a pianist. Even if it’s a one word instruction score:

‘Tacet’, to ‘not play’.

Perhaps this relationship of the controlled element to the

uncontrolled elements is the theme of what I’ve been
talking about.

At the centre of Ornette Coleman’s practise and thought is

the idea that everything is connected to everything else. C
major might be connected to Db somehow. And a musical
interval may be connected to love or the smell of the
earth. Ornette plays with Moroccan musicians at one
moment and that European invention the symphony
orchestra the next.

Both LaMont Young and Terry Riley played some kind of

bop before they became the founding fathers of
Minimalism. The heterophonic textures of Riley’s ‘In C’
look both ways towards the textural micro polyphony of
Ligeti’s ‘Chamber Concerto’ and back to Parker. And a
more recent work like Andressen ‘Hout’ has the memory
of those bop lines imprinted in its DNA.

The British version of Fluxus was The Scratch Orchestra

led by Cornelius Cardew who’s ‘The Great Learning’ is a
series of instruction score. John White’s ‘Newspaper Read
Machine’ is a fascinating example of how instruction score
show’s creative process. In America the experimental
approach continued in work by Daniel Goode and his one
page scores. Sorry this has turned into a stream of
possible connections. Hopefully it’s useful in provoking a
visit to the record shop or library or a few hours googling.

“Harmolodic allows a person to use a multiplicity of

elements to express more than one direction at a
time."

I hope that the thoughts and connections I’ve put

together here could possibly be Harmolodic. When Ornette
talks about Harmolodics I think he’s talking about the
creative process. It’s the continuity of action and
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experience that can pull disparate things together, be they

musical pitches or different people from different places
and traditions; to be together and to make music. This is
what for me is at the centre of Ornette Colemen’s life,
music and idea.

Sources

Ornette Coleman his life and Music

by Peter Niklas Wilson
(Berkeley Hills Books 2002)

Music in a New Found Land

by Wilfrid Mellers ( Barrie and Rockliff 1964)

Fluxus Source Book

ed Ken Friedman Owen Smith Lauren Sawchyn
(Performance Reseach Publications 2002)

Thanks to Neil Quintin, Cameron Reynolds (Learning & Participation

(Music) at the South Bank Centre) and Dominic Murcott (Head of
Compostion) at Trinity Laban for making it all possible.

© andrewpoppy June 2009