Jazz people all know that Vladimir Horowitz loved the jazz pianist Art Tatum. The biggest name in classical piano today, Yuja Wang, plays Tatum’s arrangement of “Tea for Two” as an encore. Not all of the greatest jazz pianists were classically trained, but many were: Bill Evans, Teddy Wilson, Herbie Hancock, and Ellis Larkins, to name a few. My perspective is that of a jazz pianist who loves the classical repertoire and has spent a lot of time, not all of it wisely, trying to understand, play, and occasionally even perform classical pieces. About ten years ago I started teaching jazz piano, mainly to adults, and at some point was asked by one of them for help with a classical piece. Feeling sort of like a charlatan, I obliged, and it didn’t go too badly, or so I felt. I tried to be honest about the fact that jazz was my area of competence, but the demands for classical instruction kept coming, including from accomplished classical pianists who were curious about jazz and wanted to study both kinds of music with me.
Before the coronavirus reduced piano teaching and everything else to a sorry shambles, I held regular recitals at my studio, which also happens to be my living room. At these recitals students played jazz and classical music, the jazz pieces usually including an upright bassist hired for the occasion. I saved the programs of these recitals, which included jazz such as Satin Doll, Bag’s Groove, Lullaby of Birdland, Blues for Sarka (by the bassist George Mraz), Here’s That Rainy Day, Whisper Not, Decision (by Sonny Rollins), lots of stuff by Charlie Parker and other bebop players such as Confirmation, Yardbird Suite, and Billie’s Bounce, and classical pieces such as To a Wild Rose, Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau in D minor, individual movements from classical sonatas (including those of the dreaded Clementi), pieces by Poulenc, Aaron Copland, Shostakovich, Bach, William Bolcom, Chopin, Gershwin, and others. Even though my path to teaching classical piano was crooked, time-honored favorites such as Chopin’s 4th Prelude, Schumann’s Traumerie, and others forced their way in. You can teach piano any way you want, but sooner or later you will teach Fur Elise.
At present I find my teaching about equally divided between jazz and classical music. I have tried to find a way of talking about the two kinds of music that doesn’t blur them together yet highlights what they have in common. From a teacher’s perspective, the main difference between jazz and classical music is that jazz is not mainly written down. Jazz, at its core, is improvisation (so, according to the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, is classical music, but leave that aside for now). What this means from a teaching perspective is simple: most jazz instruction on any instrument, but especially harmonic instruments like the piano and guitar, focuses on harmony, knowledge of which is essential to improvising. Harmony can be a contentious topic, as when the aforementioned Heinrich Schenker writes with almost murderous rage about rival music theorists such as Jean-Philippe Rameau. No one, in my opinion, completely understands harmony, but as long as the discussion is confined to Western music, which includes jazz, a few things about harmony can confidently be said.
In 1893, another German theorist named Hugo Riemann coined the phrase “functional harmony” to describe features easily observable in most Western music. Whether they have heard of Riemann or not, most jazz teachers, myself included, are indebted to him for clarifying three harmonic functions that define all types of Western music including classical, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, Bossa Nova, and others. Atonal, aleatory, and other Western musics that refuse these three functions are still defined by them. The three functions are tonic, dominant, and subdominant.
Since I am a teacher and performer and not a theorist, I do not defend or attack these functions as semi-divine or as a sinister German plot against the human spirit, but try to use them to help people play better. There are many ways to explain them, and many short videos on YouTube that do so quite well. When I explain them to my students I usually do so in the context of a piece of music in which they are easy to hear, such as the first three measures of Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick out of You or the first four measures of Bach’s C Major Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier. The first three measures of the Porter tune are governed by the subdominant, dominant and tonic functions in that order, and the first four measures of the Bach belong to the tonic, subdominant, dominant, and tonic functions respectively.
The opposite of music, as everyone knows, is not silence. If it has to have an opposite (and maybe it doesn’t), my nominee would be motionlessness (not “stillness,” which sounds musical). Music is movement, and the concept of functional harmony does justice to this fact. Harmony moves, and its movement, like that of most melody, is directional: that is why people use the phrase “chord progression.” The three functions are a way of talking about how harmony achieves its sense of direction. The tonic function, which often belongs to the chord based on the first note of the do-re-mi scale (but doesn’t have to belong to that chord) means, or induces the auditory experience of, departure and arrival: the first four measures of the Bach Prelude are a walk around the block, leaving the house in the first measure and returning to it in the fourth. The dominant function, typically though again not invariably assigned to the chord based on the fifth note of the major scale, successfully finds, or “resolves” to, the tonic, thereby in a sense creating the tonic or saturating it with the feeling of arrival. The subdominant function, usually allied in Beethoven or rock music with the chord of the major scale’s fourth degree and in jazz with that of the same scale’s second degree, can also resolve to the tonic but is a bit of a wanderer, on its own though not in a rebellious way.
A good jazz improviser hears these functions in whatever she is playing and cooperates with them. A great improviser, such as Charlie Parker, has so thoroughly digested functional harmony that he can subvert or almost outsmart it. My goal as a teacher is to create intimacy between the student’s mind and these three functions. When I turn from jazz to classical music, nothing changes harmonically, because jazz and classical music have the same harmonic basis. There is, however, a difference. In teaching jazz the discussion is mostly about harmony, and in teaching something like a Beethoven sonata the emphasis falls, for me at least, on physical movement. The physical movements of jazz musicians take care of themselves, which is why Abby Whiteside, a famous classical piano teacher, constantly urged her students to listen to jazz. “Jazz players,” she says, “are always right if they have not been taught. They have a tune in their ears and a rhythm in their bodies.” There may be some idealization here, but her point is that jazz musicians are intent on a certain sound and don’t worry about how to get it. Classical musicians can’t afford to think this way. If you want to play a Beethoven sonata or Chopin nocturne, you have to study, or maybe find is a better word, the physical movements that correspond to the notes on the page.
When I teach the physical movements necessary to make a classical piece sound good, I obviously limit myself to the piano. Like all musical instruments, the piano is movement-centered, but unlike an upright bass or snare drum, the piano hides many of the physical movements, such as muscular contractions in the wrist and elbow, that a player needs, A book (by Tobias Matthay) called The Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique tries (and, I’m afraid, fails) to address this topic. I focus on things such as controlling the downward movements of piano keys with the fingers and what makes that control possible. I try to connect these physical issues with those of functional harmony, not to mention phrasing, dynamics, and other things.
Sonatas, fugues, and other complex structures are not incidental to classical music but are part of its texture. That is another way of saying that classical music is composer-centered. Great jazz composers such as Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk do not alter the fact that jazz is centered on performers, not composers. Jazz musicians achieve stunning effects with high-quality popular songs by Gershwin or Cole Porter, but also with less impressive tunes by hacks. This happens because lyricism, which I think is the essence of jazz, does not depend on elaborate formal structures. Jazz from the beginning has emphasized lyricism, and defines greatness as the creation of a personal sound. Jazz musicians who are considered unproblematically “great” have immediately recognizable sounds: John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Ben Webster, Count Basie, Sidney Bechet, Miles Davis, to name a few.
Despite this emphasis on something that can’t be taught, jazz relies on structures such as the 32-bar song form or 12-bar blues that can be taught, and that are products of functional harmony. The lyrical impulse in jazz does not account for these structures, which come from the impulse to organize sound. When I discuss harmony with someone who is trying to improvise I don’t trace it back to some alleged origin, but just try to show how it works. It works the same way in a Beethoven sonata as it does in a 12-bar blues. One of the most beautiful things in Western music is the way the blues moves out of its three-chord (or often no-chord) beginnings into the complex harmonic world of jazz. One of the cliches of jazz writing I happen to agree with is that everything in jazz is saturated with the blues, which can assimilate complex harmony and still remain true to itself. To prove this point to students I sometimes play them a piece by Sonny Boy Williamson followed by something by Charlie Parker or Gene Ammons.
A student occasionally asks for help with a rock or pop song. I can accommodate the request because functional harmony is neutral with regard to musical content. It organizes the material of a pop song as well as that of a Beethoven sonata. I have “taught” certain songs by riveting my gaze on functional harmony and tuning out the rest. Snobbery is avoided, and my child’s shoes are paid for.
The fact that piano teaching is a job does not rule out the possibility that it is also an art, as piano playing obviously is. I rely on functional harmony and physical movement as tools because they allow me to be objective without pretending to be a scientist. Music has a strong overlap with science, math and logic but ultimately escapes being defined by them. Good teaching, in my opinion, occurs at the edge of this distinction. It promotes as much conscious control as the material allows, and tries to respect the parts that elude control.