{"id":1281,"date":"2011-12-05T11:52:54","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2011-12-05T11:52:54","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:52:54","slug":"third-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=1281","title":{"rendered":"Third Stream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this fall I had the chance to go and listen to Gunther Schuller speak about his ideas regarding the Third Stream, in a gross simplification it is simply Schuller’s idea of what to call some sort of fusion between jazz and classical music. \u00a0Schuller explains it more deeply in his book Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller<\/em>:<\/p>\n

THIRD STREAM is a way of composing, improvising, and performing that brings musics together rather than segregating them. \u00a0It is a way of making music which holds that all musics are created equal<\/em>, coexisting in a beautiful brotherhood\/sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other. \u00a0It is a global concept which allows the world’s musics-written, improvised, handed-down, traditional, experimental-to come together, to learn from one another, to reflect human diversity and pluralism. It is the music of rapprochement of entent<\/em>–not of competition and confrontation. \u00a0And it is the logical outcome of the American melting pot: E pluribus unum<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Setting Schuller aside for a moment, I also heard later on in the semester that Mark O’Connor had spoken a bit on his idea of where music in the world was headed. \u00a0Unfortunately I was not able to attend the lecture where O’Connor made these statements, so they might just be hearsay and should be taken with a grain of salt. But via my friend Joy Adams, O’Connor seemed to feel strongly that American music was going to play a very strong role in influencing the music of the world in the future. \u00a0(As an aside: it hasn’t already??<\/em>) \u00a0Joy insisted O’Connor meant American music in general but\u00a0I thought that O’Connor probably meant American folk music specifically, because that’s O’Connor’s thing<\/em>. Much like Schuller writes that Third Stream is a philosophy of inclusiveness and any combination of cultural styles should be considered as such, Third Stream is widely held to represent the fusion of Avant Classical and Jazz.<\/p>\n

What interests me about these two musician’s ideas is that they may be on to something but I believe they are a little off in which direction the fusion between contemporary classical and a “popular form” is\u00a0occurring. \u00a0To be clear, Third Stream (Jazz + Classical) did happen, you can hear it ranging from Schuller himself to Milhaud, but as far as the future goes, I believe that indie music and bands like Radio Head and the singer Bj\u00f6rk are going to have a much greater impact on classical’s”fused” form rather than Jazz or folk music. \u00a0Just listen to young composers of the likes of \u00a0Nico Muhly<\/a>,\u00a0Missy Mazzoli<\/a>, Corey Dargel<\/a>\u00a0who’s sounds cross over heavily into indie-pop pop territory. \u00a0Granted much of what they do is an extension along the minimalist-post-minimalist-(whatever the hell we should call this movement) axis, but in our current version of the Third Stream, what’s wrong with a lot of cross-pollination?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this fall I had the chance to go and listen to Gunther Schuller speak about his ideas regarding the Third Stream, in a gross simplification it is simply Schuller’s idea of what to call some sort of fusion between jazz and classical music. Schuller explains it more deeply in his book Musings: The Musical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-philosophy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1283,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}