In this episode, Mark Micchelli examines the relationship between music theory and creative practice via a firsthand exploration of the formal structure of Cecil Taylor’s solo piano improvisations.

This episode was produced by Jason Jedlicka along with Team Lead Matthew Ferrandino. Special thanks to peer reviewers Chris Stover and John Heilig.

SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/

[Intro Theme by Maria Tartaglia.]

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory! In this episode, Mark Micchelli examines the relationship between music theory and creative practice via a firsthand exploration of the formal structure of Cecil Taylor’s solo piano improvisations.

In the Jorge Luis Borges short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a literary critic describes the curious life’s work of the fictional author Pierre Menard. Menard sought to write—not copy, but actually write—the novel Don Quixote, originally written by Miguel de Cervantes. The narrator explains Menard’s initial strategy: “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes” (1939: 91).

Yet Menard ultimately decided this impossible task wasn’t impossible enough; instead, becoming Cervantes was “less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard” (1939: 91).

The premise is thought-provoking and delightfully absurd: an excellent short story, but a crazy thing to actually try and do. Yet this was exactly the situation I found myself in deep into my research on the solo piano music of Cecil Taylor (Micchelli 2022). I’m particularly interested in the physical aspects of Taylor’s pianism. Watching him improvise is almost like watching a dance or an athletic event, and Taylor himself held strong opinions about the importance of movement in music-making.

So I figured that, if I’m going to truly understand how Cecil Taylor improvised, I’d need to actually, physically perform a Cecil Taylor improvisation. But how exactly would I do that? Playing a transcription note-for-note might approximate Taylor’s body position at the keyboard, but my headspace would be totally different. So what I really needed to do was improvise a Cecil Taylor improvisation. But how would such an exercise even be possible? How does one improvise something that’s already been improvised?

In today’s podcast episode, I’ll explain how I navigated my way out of this metaphysical conundrum. My answer, as it turns out, wasn’t all that different from Pierre Menard’s: instead of trying to become Cecil Taylor, I would understand Cecil Taylor by becoming more like myself. In this case, a more personal approach to improvisation analysis proved more effective than an imitative one.

As a result, this podcast is something in between a musical analysis and an artist talk: I’ll pose an analytical question about Taylor’s music, and then use my own music to answer it. In my conclusion, I’ll reflect more generally on how creative practice may be used as a mode of music-theoretical research, situating this analytical methodology within the centuries-long history of the discipline.

[bumper music]

The analytical question at the center of this episode concerns the way Taylor interpreted his own sheet music. Looking at a Taylor score is a bewildering experience. There are no clefs, no time signatures, not even staff lines: just note names and accidents jumbled together like one of those ABC magnet sets a child might play with on a refrigerator. Upon closer examination, one finds that certain note names are grouped together, and that each of these groups serves as a blueprint for a short musical improvisation.

For example, here’s a group consisting of five notes: [play]. Taylor might isolate the middle three pitches of this phrase: [play] and play them in prime-and-retrograde [play], and/or transpose them by octave [play]. This is in the right hand; for in the left hand, Taylor will play a different five-note phrase: [play]. Then, when played together, the hands will proceed either in similar motion [play] or contrary motion [play].

I refer to these short musical blueprints and their improvisatory realizations as “Cecil Taylor Cells,” or CTCs. Each realization of a Cecil Taylor Cell might last only a couple seconds, so a full improvisation might consist of dozens, or even hundreds of such cells. And this brings me to the central question for today’s episode: how exactly did Taylor choose which cell to play at which time? Looking at the scattered arrangement of letter names on a Cecil Taylor score, it’s not immediately clear that his cells were intended to be played in any particular order.

But listening to his recordings, Taylor always grouped his cells into what I’m calling “choruses,” in which the same ordering of up to six cells was performed twice or more. For example, here’s a brief snippet of an improvisation featured in the 1981 Ron Mann documentary, “Imagine the Sound.” In this case, I’ve labelled the six cells 1–6, and you’ll notice that Cecil Taylor will occasionally move backwards before proceeding forwards in that ordering from 1–6.

[talk over Cecil Taylor recording]

So was this cell ordering from 1–6 predetermined, or decided on-the-fly? “Predetermined” is the safe answer, but I was curious to know whether “on-the-fly” was possible, especially because any cell ordering would need to be repeated exactly. In the heat of an improvisation, could someone select those same six Cecil Taylor Cells, improvise their ordering, and then repeat that ordering exactly? I resolved to answer this question by trying it myself. To help you follow along with the improvisations to come, here are each of the six cells played in isolation.

This is #1 [play]. #2 [play]. #3 [play]. #4 [play]. #5 [play]. And #6 [play].

In this first take, I start with cell #5. The commentary you’ll hear was layered in after the fact; in other words, I was not actually trying to speak into the microphone and improvise at the same time.

[talk and play, introducing cells]

So I’ll stop there to say that the ordering that I improvised in-the-moment was 5-1-2-4-6-3. Here is how I continued that improvisation.

[talk over my improvisation #1, part 1]

So, that didn’t go great. Let me take you into my headspace. As I was performing, of course it was quite challenging to remember my initial cell ordering. But that challenge was compounded because so much of my mental energy was taken up trying to do the Cecil Taylor thing with Cecil Taylor Cells—that is to say, prime and retrograde cell realization, with my hands exclusively in similar or contrary motion.

[talk over my improvisation #1, part 2]

So that went better. I successfully managed to repeat the cell ordering, but I’m not 100% pleased with my execution. In particular, my transition from cell 6 to cell 1 the second time through was a bit sloppy; you might’ve noticed that I was improvising material not directly related to any cell:

[bumper music]

Taking you into my headspace, this second improvisation easier than the first for a couple reasons. Most obviously, because I wasn’t always trying to sound exactly like Cecil Taylor, I could focus more on what cell I was on and what cell I needed to go to. Furthermore, while improvising, I assigned different cells different musical textures: for example, cell 4 was all block chords [play], while cells 1 and 2 were more arpeggiated [play]. This gave me an extra piece of aural information to recall when trying to replicate the original cell ordering the second time.

And while this is a subjective assessment, I’d say that my second improvisation was just… better than my first one. My first improvisation is a paradigmatic example of what Tracy McMullen calls “Replay,” a type of performance practice that claims authenticity but in reality seeks to tame or control the original artwork by keeping it at a safe remove (2019). By contrast, my second improvisation has more in common with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Signifyin(g), in which source material is used as a springboard for creative exploration (1988).

As an artist, I certainly had a lot more fun performing the second improvisation, and I think that counts for something, both in terms of improvisation quality and in terms of understanding what might’ve been going through Taylor’s head as he improvised. Taylor wasn’t saddling himself with questions of historically authentic performance practice; he was acting as an artist, pursuing musical pathways that appealed to him in-the-moment.

Which got me thinking: why should I even use Taylor’s cells to begin with? Taylor spent decades improvising with Cecil Taylor Cells prior to the Imagine the Sound documentary recording. Why shouldn’t I design my own Mark Micchelli cells using musical material that I too have spent decades improvising with?

[bumper music]

This is the moment when this episode shifts from a music analysis to an artist talk. I’d like to introduce you to my composition “Reimagine the Sound”—the title being a play on the title of that Ron Mann documentary. As in a Cecil Taylor composition, this piece uses cell-based notation. However, my cells feature far more than just note names: they also feature pitch class numbers, scale degrees, and transformational notation.

As before, I’ll begin by playing each of my six cells in isolation [play]:

First is cell #1, which takes an (0235) tetrachord, divides it into a pair of whole tone simultaneities, and then transposes the whole tetrachord at the tritone [play].

This is cell #2, which takes an (0268) tetrachord, divides it into a pair of whole tone simultaneities, and then transposes that whole tetrachord at the fifth [play].

Now, cell #3, which takes an (0257) tetrachord, once again divides it into a pair of whole tone simultaneities, this time transposing the tetrachord at the minor sixth [play].

Cell #4 takes chords alternating major and minor thirds, transposing every other note up or down by half step [play].

Cell #5 is a monophonic idea, involving an ascending do-re-mi and then transposing that up by fifths [play].

Finally, cell #6 is my most abstract: free improvisation where my left and right hands always play exactly a perfect fifth apart [play].

Now I’ll try a full improvisation. In this take, I start with cell #1.

[talk over my improvisation #3]

That was the best yet, both in terms of repetition accuracy and, in my opinion, musical quality. Dynamics and register played an additional role in helping me to remember cell ordering, to the point where I wasn’t even thinking about cell numbers at all. Instead of thinking 1 to 3 to 4, I thought that I’d like to start with loud (0235) tetrachords that grew into (0257)s, and then that developed into quiet, high-register tertian voicings.

This is typical of my thought process when improvising, which made the process of repeating the improvisation much easier. The notes themselves also fell into hand shapes I’ve spent a lot of time practicing; this further decreased my mental load and also allowed me to perform much faster than I could in the previous two improvisations. In fact, the opening of my recapitulation was so quick and dissonant that one might be forgiven thinking that the performer was actually Cecil Taylor.

[play snippet]

And lo and behold, I’ve become just like Pierre Menard, who wrote Don Quixote through the experience of being Pierre Menard. With this composition, “Reimagine the Sound,” I confirmed that improvising cell ordering is indeed possible, not by trying to imitate Cecil Taylor, but by re-creating Cecil Taylor using my own artistic voice. I answered an analytical question about form in Taylor’s improvisations, while simultaneously staying true to my own artistic identity.

[bumper music]

As an academic and a jazz musician, I’ve noticed significant differences in how these groups approach the idea of music theory. For some academics, music-theoretical work is ideally presented as objective and formalist, with the identity of the theoretician being largely a non-factor. But for jazz musicians, music-theoretical work is primarily about self-expression—or as Cecil Taylor put it, ever enigmatically: “We procede [sic] inventing; the interpretation has occured [sic]” (1966).

This idea is less obliquely articulated by George Russell, in his landmark text, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. On the very first page of the very first work of music theory written by a Black jazz artist, Russell writes that the Concept is “not a system, but rather a view or philosophy of tonality in which the student, it is hoped, will find [their] own identity” (1959: 1).

This raises a critically important question. If I—especially as a white person—am going to publish music-theoretical research about Cecil Taylor, or George Russell, or other creative jazz musicians, shouldn’t I honor what they have to say about what music-theoretical research actually entails? Do I not have an obligation to develop my own creative voice, and then place that at the center of my music-theoretical discussions?

Yes, I think I do. But I’ll freely admit that this conclusion feels somewhat presumptuous. Cecil Taylor is one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Who am I to be situating my own creative work next to his? I’m certainly not the first music theorist to lead a double life as a composer and/or improviser, yet I’ve been hard-pressed to find other theorists foregrounding their creative work in their scholarship as prominently as I’m doing now.

That is—I’m hard-pressed when looking at the recent history of the field. In the twentieth century, composers like Arnold Schoenberg (1922, 1950), Milton Babbitt (1961, 1962, 1970, 1976), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1989), and others wrote and lectured on music-theoretical topics, using their own music as examples. In his dissertation, William O’Hara (2017) has documented numerous examples of theorist recompositions stretching back to the 1700s. Indeed, some of the earliest extant European music-theoretical texts—such as Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) and Zarlino’s Art of Counterpoint (1558)—feature dozens of musical examples composed by the authors. And of course, jazz musicians do this sort of thing all the time.

Just to name a few: George Russell (1959, 2001), Yusef Lateef (1981), Fred Anderson (2010), Ran Blake (2010), David Baker (1987, 1988, 1990), Mark Levine (1989), and Dariusz Terefenko (2018) all use their own riffs or compositions in their music-theoretical texts. So with these precedents in mind, I’ll try and move past my feelings of presumptuousness and proudly share my compositional work with you here today. To that end, I’d like to conclude this podcast with a full performance of the composition I wrote to analyze Cecil Taylor’s music, “Reimagine the Sound.” The score, and a bibliography for this episode, are both available on the SMT-Pod website.

[full recording of “Reimagine the Sound,” followed by acknowledgements]

I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to my peer reviewers, Chris Stover and John Heilig, my team lead, Matthew Ferrandino, and my producer, Jason Jedlicka.

[Outro Theme by Yike Zhang.]

Visit our website, smt-pod.org, for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. You can join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments to @SMT_Pod. SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. Thanks for listening!