Third stream

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Third Stream (Engl. Third flow ) is an American US by the composer Gunther Schuller at the beginning of 1950 years called initiated genre, which the European new music with the Modern Jazz combines and music beyond E and light music bring should .

Concept and development

Schuller coined the term in 1957 in a lecture at Brandeis University to describe music that combined elements of Western art music and jazz while combining the "essential characteristics and techniques of both". It is about the "union of two in the material level and in the artistic self-image advanced spheres" so purely entertaining works of the symphonic jazz of Paul Whiteman can be with their classical bonds or strings backed jazz improvisations excluded here.

Composers like Robert Graettinger , who composed complex works for Stan Kenton , or Johnny Carisi can be seen as forerunners of the Third Stream. Although this approach produced some exemplary works such as Epitaph by Charles Mingus , it was ultimately not able to assert itself on a broad front and remained a side development in music history. The driving forces behind this genre were Schuller and Mingus, among others Bill Russo , John Lewis , Eddie Sauter , Don Ellis , Ran Blake and JJ Johnson . Mátyás Seiber and John Dankworth wrote the work Improvisations for jazz band and orchestra together in 1958 , which included twelve-tone music and jazz improvisations ; In the program booklet for the German premiere in 1965, the piece was rated as "the most successful attempt to bring new music and jazz under one roof".

“If the euphoria of the Third Stream faded in the 1960s, it was mainly for two reasons: On the one hand, it remained a matter of dispute as to how the most coherent connection between jazz and advanced electronic music should be made ... on the other hand, the emerging free jazz showed alternative Ways of opening up the frozen harmonic, rhythmic and formal schemes that seemed to many jazz listeners more plausible and coherent than the third-stream scores, which were scolded as "cerebral" and "constructed". Musicians like Anthony Braxton or Frank Zappa were nevertheless strongly influenced by this direction in their compositional work, but found their own proposed solutions. “In the eighties, of course, as free jazz itself showed signs of wear and tear, the idea of ​​the third stream was taken up again by a new generation of musicians who were equally versed in jazz and classical music.” Younger musicians such as James Newton , Anthony Davis or Franz Koglmann took as well experienced musicians like Allan Botschinsky took up the challenge again.

Current works with a third-stream characteristic are Alegria by Wayne Shorter , Wide Angles by Michael Brecker , African Portraits by Hannibal Marvin Peterson , Scorched by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Myth of the Cave by Yitzhak Yedid .

See also

literature

  • Gunther Schuller: Musings: The Musical Words of Gunther Schuller . Oxford University Press 1986. ISBN 0-19-503745-6 .
  • Peter W. Schatt: "Jazz" in art music . Kassel 1995. ISBN 3-7649-2476-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ According to Schatt: "Jazz" in art music , p. 179.
  2. ^ Herbert Hellhund : Third Stream. The relationship between a controversial concept and a subject that can be misunderstood. In: Ingrid Karl: Jazz op. 3. The secret love of jazz for European modernism. Vienna 1986, p. 45.
  3. ↑ cit. after Mátyás Seiber: Improvisations (Schott-Verlag) ( Memento of December 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ a b Peter Niklas Wilson : Basic concepts of new music and jazz. In: Franz Xaver Ohnesorg: The Liberation of Music - An Introduction to the Music of the 20th Century. Bergisch Gladbach, Gustav Lübbe Verlag, 1994, pp. 337-361.

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