Output details

Scenic Routes: audio CD album (scores not appropriate) including six works by Koller, with composer as conductor. Works contained: Libertine; Herb; Air; Kinship; Mystery; Invisible.

This composition, performance and recording project represents an integrated programme of original compositions (‘Libertine’, ‘Herb’, ‘Air’, ‘Kinship’, ‘Mystery’ and ‘Invisible’) and original arrangements (‘Music always/Brings goodness’ by Ornette Coleman, and ‘Segment’ by Charlie Parker), specially conceived for the Hamburg-based NDR Big Band. There are two main research aspects to the compositions presented in this project. The first involves the development of a modular melodic language, and the second is the devising of strategies to integrate current rhythmic innovations into the context of the jazz orchestra. Through researching concepts of tonal organisation (George Russell, and Bob Brookmeyer, with whom Koller studied in 2006), now feeding into Koller’s PhD project at the Conservatoire, the initial work was on generating melodies of limited intervallic construction. These are used here to bind the material together motivically, and create distinct tension contours to develop the melodic material (for example in ‘Kinship’, ‘Libertine’ and ‘Invisible’), and to generate the formal design structures of the composition.

Rhythm is where the most radical innovations in jazz have happened over the past two decades, but this has been mostly confined to the workings of the small band. _Scenic Routes_ explores the idea of rhythmic cycles and layering through displacement in the context of the jazz orchestra. For instance, ‘Air’ is based on a 10-bar cycle that repeats six times a non-retrogradable pattern (inspired by Messiaen’s concept of rhythmic organisation), with changing harmonic contours, and orchestrated across the ensemble. As a way of developing the material, the lines are subsequently shifted forward by a beat, and then by two and a half beats, to resolve eventually onto a unison line behind the soloing of saxophonist Christoph Lauer. Thus, the composition’s overall dénouement is one unified rhythmic contour.