Gradually I slowed down and began emphasizing the music which I thought we were escaping from, the music called jazz. Then after 1965 the obligatory rock groups outstaged everybody else, and afterwards all the performers walk out of their own doors, unchanged. Rarely have these musicians listened passionately to artists like Billie Holiday. Few have developed skills of aural retention which could have been strengthened from memorization of the easier Bartok Mikrokosmos. The symphonic players often ask to improvise within contexts that they may not have had the chance to assimilate. The “jazz combo,” which usually played chord changes they had failed to memorize, either because of lack of rehearsal time or for less forgivable reasons, stared at the written changes, cloning the expected slick arpeggiations or scale patterns. ![]() In the extreme cases string, woodwind, brass, and percussion players read their parts and when there were chances to improvise, certain things happened. Third Stream for the composer was usually anything but that for the performer. Yet if things were becoming less rigid for the eclectic musician who wishes to notate, it was not so for most of the performers, who were seldom allowed a similar license. I hasten to add that as a community of musicians attempting to extend the boundaries of improvisation, we do not hold a monopoly. Perhaps our program is unique, however, in that students get credit both for disciplined ear work and for finding themselves. Also in California today Randy Masters of the University of California at Santa Cruz encourages students to explore a diversity of musical styles. Much of this research takes place in laboratories and may be of great benefit in the future. There are people in California who are doing advanced research projects on auditory processing. Today we are not alone in our work with the ear. So in 1972 the Third Stream Department - the first of its kind - was established at New England Conservatory. Later I joined him at the New England Conservatory, where we both realized there was a need for a department which could offer a nonrestrictive, disciplined approach to improvisation without taming the genius and the madness which might be trapped in the young and undeveloped musician. Now I am convinced that it is a process, an action, and if the final product must be labeled, a new term such as “salsa” will be coined, or it will carry the name of the author, e.g., Mingus. ![]() During the last few months I have begun to use the term Third Stream as a verb. But this still defines a finished product, an entity. ![]() At the time this seemed the most relaxed and least doctrinaire meaning. Why must the two tributaries represent only classical and jazz?3 Why not substitute one of the many styles and traditions of ethnic music? What would one label the vital percussive tribal music of Nigeria blended with the cries of the Ainu from northern Japan? About two years later my colleagues and I went a step further towards a clearer definition by describing Third Stream music as a label for an anti-label music. When Gunther Schuller and I founded the Third Stream department at New England Conservatory, I broadened Schuller’s original definition very slightly. Gunther Schuller has defined Third Stream Music as “the result of two tributaries - one from the stream of classical music and one from the stream of black music - that have recently flowed out towards each other in the space between the two, leaving the main streams undisturbed, or mostly.”1 For Schuller Third Stream music fused “the improvisational spontaneity and rhythmic vitality of jazz with the compositional procedures and techniques acquired in Western music during 700 years of musical development.”2
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