I'm not sure I am understanding your terms. I use modal chromaticism which just means I am improvising on a modal tune (a tone whose harmony was conceived of as being one mode) and I play outside using different approaches. I also use polymodal chromaticism although I have never called it that.

Modal chromaticism in jazz can certainly use polymodal chromaticism by the definition you give above. You could be playing Impression and over E-7 use EF#GABC#DE or you could use EFGABCDE or you could use EF#GABCD#E, or even EFGABbCDE etc..... these are just using different modes and scales over that E tonic. The possibilities are endless depending on how outside you want to get.

As far as modal chromaticism, players use whatever works for them to improvise chromatically. You could use chromatic patterns that are memorized, you could use long strings of approach note lines mixed with chromatic lines, you can jump your lines to other keys and back, you can use shifting pentatonics, you can use what I wrote about above or quite honestly you can just use randomness where you play randomly for a sec or two and then bring it back to the key.

These are just thoughts from my jazz brain. Not sure if they help or if you are looking for some classical theory definition which I don't keep up with as much.......

 

I'm not sure I am understanding your terms. I use modal chromaticism which just means I am improvising on a modal tune (a tone whose harmony was conceived of as being one mode) and I play outside using different approaches. I also use polymodal chromaticism although I have never called it that.

Modal chromaticism in jazz can certainly use polymodal chromaticism by the definition you give above. You could be playing Impression and over E-7 use EF#GABC#DE or you could use EFGABCDE or you could use EF#GABCD#E, or even EFGABbCDE etc..... these are just using different modes and scales over that E tonic. The possibilities are endless depending on how outside you want to get.

As far as modal chromaticism, players use whatever works for them to improvise chromatically. You could use chromatic patterns that are memorized, you could use long strings of approach note lines mixed with chromatic lines, you can jump your lines to other keys and back, you can use shifting pentatonics, you can use what I wrote about above or quite honestly you can just use randomness where you play randomly for a sec or two and then bring it back to the key.

These are just thoughts from my jazz brain. Not sure if they help or if you are looking for some classical theory definition which I don't keep up with as much.......

I'm being asked to discuss the concept in light of a school project where I had some short examples of Lew Tabackin's improvisations I got from the book, "The Lew Tabackin Collection". I think he's referring to something in those examples, but I can't see any excerpts I included that have progressions that are exactly "modal", so maybe he's just asking the question in general.

At any rate, it seems that you're saying what I kind of thought. Whether there are many (poly) modes or not, the concept would be that modes that share the same tonic would include chromatic fragments (which would necessarily be extraneous material from whatever mode is being used because there would be notes outside of the mode).

Would a simple example be a parallel minor, which has the same tonic as the related major: these scales have different notes but they share the same tonic- and incorporating chramaticism into the improvisation of these? I guess the progression would be like a Cmaj7 to a Cmin7, both of which would have the same tonic? That would mean any scale I guess, that had the same tonic, and the typical chord that would "go with" the scale? I might be way off base. Just not wanting to sound sound like too much of a moron...

 

I think you're probably on the right track with the "modal mixture" approach of parallel major and minor. I would certainly tend to argue that the term "polymodal chromaticism" would be redundant if the concept of "modal chromaticism" is the centering of any number of parallel modes over a single tonic. Between the modes of major, harmonic minor, and melodic minor alone, without getting into any symmetrical or "synthetic" scale ideas, that's already 21 seven-note scales, 147 note options, within a single octave. That represents each of the twelve notes of western tempered tuning more than a dozen times, so I don't know how "polymodal" could expand on anything!

I've been listening to Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra" and a few of his other orchestral works lately. What an incredibly brilliant composer. If there's music that's more "harmonically advanced" out there that still retains that level of visceral, evocative beauty, I'm not aware of it.

 

I'm not an expert but I'm an amateur theory nerd, so....As best I can tell, "polymodal chromaticism" is Bartok's coinage and applies only to his approach to his composition. I don't see how this term would be of use in analyzing a jazz improvisation, which of course might be modal and/or chromatic. Polymodal just means using more than one mode, which is usually the case in jazz. Traditional folk music is often based on just one mode.

 

Thank you for the input on this- gave me food for thought for the discussion I had with teachers. I learned something for sure. "Classical" theory and jazz theory are related, but completely different animals also!

 

Music theory is certainly a gray and squishy field, and terminology describing the same piece of music can change from scene to scene. As much as I enjoy music theory (particularly the aural aspect), my priorities are performing, composing, and improvising rather than analysis for analysis' sake. So I think it's useful to compartmentalize "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive" transcription and analysis, and I focus pretty much exclusively on "prescriptive" for myself and with my students. I find the jazz/contemporary method of analysis to be much more useful prescriptively than a more academic approach, which might be more useful for communicating with strict music analysts (if they still exist).

This Ravel piece is one of my very favorite pieces of music. I think it could easily be analyzed in jazz/contemporary harmonic and melodic terms, in the same way I might analyze a Bill Evans piece or solo.

 

love this piece, too. It's just so amazing how composers such as Ravel and just before him Debussy were able to basically move away from late Romantic key centered dominated ideas to having melodies and harmonies work in motif and tone centered ideas. It still had to written down of course and it's fascinating to follow the music along with the score.