Introduction
Recently, I’ve been studying some of Steve Coleman’s thoughts about music. I’ve been aware of his ideas for years, but never looked into the concepts in detail. Now, I’m spending some time with them and find some interesting. I haven’t halted my exploration of his ideas, but have decided to spend some time with one of them while I check out others (and continue with my own work in various other areas – please see my practice blog).
The idea I’m working on is Coleman’s concept of Spiral Interval structures. Essentially, I’m trying to follow Coleman’s own progression of understanding and skill development regarding working with intervals. He explains in his essay on symmetry that his first step along this path was to write and practice etudes to develop knowledge (aural and tactile/kinetic) of various intervals. So, I’ve tried to recreate his etudes based on concepts in his essay. Please visit the Steve Coleman’s original article to read his description and more detail about his concepts of Symmetry
As I’ve been blogging about the work I’m doing, several musicians have asked me about the Symmetrical Interval Spiral Etudes I’ve been playing. Originally, I was only working on them with C-based pivot tones. But since there has been interest, and I wanted to expand to other pivot tones anyway, I’ve created additional etudes based on the other eleven chromatic pitches.
The Etudes
Here are links to the etudes I’ve created. They are all adjusted for saxophone range and you can expand them to the range which your instrument plays. Each one will open to a separate comment and from there, a link will recur that allows you to see the pdf. (If any of you have suggestions about how to more elegantly handle this in wordpress please let me know and I’ll edit the post!). Have fun working on these ideas and please let me know what your experience is with them.