MOLECULAR SYSTEMATIC MUSIC: PART I
A living art must break away from theory & achieve new order in organic fulfillment.
- Paul Klee
Prelude:
The role of an artist is to make an art that reflects a life lived, and living. The artist attempts to bring light to the shaded regions to begin to unravel truth while still holding on to mystery as a place to be called home. The origin of one’s true self is discovered through study, discernment, and a careful examination of natural tendencies.
It is far easier to pick up a drinking glass that is unbroken than one that has been shattered into a million pieces. I prefer the challenge of the latter. No longer capable of holding water, it instead offers a perfect image of freedom and possibility. Examining the individual pieces allows one to explore the fragments of beauty itself. Along the way, one discovers the shape and character of every shard: “Pick a rose to pieces,” wrote Bertolt Brecht, “and every petal is lovely.” In the process, one discovers the possibilities inherent in abstraction (the broken glass) as well as its foundation (the unbroken glass). “The combination of relaxed and rigid rhythms results in hybrid forms,” wrote Klee.
Like my predecessors — John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler — I, as a saxophonist and composer in a direct lineage of sound painters, am attempting to deconstruct widely accepted approaches to musical form, theory, and performance practice in favor of an individualized music rooted in abstraction. In my own artistic practice, I do not intend to destroy, dismiss, or disrespect, but rather to present that which is true to my own musical “DNA” based on mapping my own experiences and preferences. I believe an artist can examine his musical experiences through the lens of DNA to discover his own artistic (genetic) code of being. These fundamental ideas have led me to develop my own system of improvisation and composition entitled: Molecular Systematic Music.
1st Movement: Inception
My theoretical foundation and interest in finding a way to map one’s own musical being began during my time in the MFA program of the California Institute of the Arts circa 2008-2010. With the encouragement of great artists such as Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith, I began to investigate who I was as an artist.
Who am I musically? Not: who am I? But: who am I musically? Who should I imitate and copy? Who should I listen to in order to learn how to be someone else before discovering my own true musical self? It seems to me essential to map, study, and embrace the rhythm of one’s own breathing before beginning to judge it right or wrong: to communicate with the confidence of an infant before submitting to rules of syntax which may later stifle spontaneity and creativity.
At the start of 2011 I began to record myself improvising on the saxophone. The purpose of studying the recordings was to begin to understand my natural tendencies as they related to my audio perception, as well as to document my own musical vocabulary. I wanted to understand and become familiar with how I was constructing sonic material while avoiding cliches and merely inherited musical ideas.
After listening to several recorded sessions, I heard myself being drawn to certain notes and rhythms emerging out of single melodic lines. This discovery surprised me. As an instrumentalist accustomed to dealing with single-note melodic lines, I considered my own auditory perceptions limited when compared to those of harmonic instrumentalists such as pianists or guitarists who were constantly dealing with clusters of notes.
This experience was the impetus that laid the foundation and initial section of Molecular Systematic Music, which argues that within a single melodic line there emerges a counter line of varied rhythms, pitches, and harmonies: it’s like an audio version of a picture within a picture.
In 2019 I began a more thorough and systematic investigation. Recording myself had by this point become part of my artistic process which I used to aid me in reaching the truest version of my artistic self. It was while studying a recent concert in which I am playing within a quartet comprised of bass, drums, sax, and piano, that I began to hear things completely differently than I had in 2011. I began to hear, or (more precisely) to visualize, the way in which I was improvising, and once again I set out to map exactly what I was feeling, hearing and (literally) seeing in my mind.
Listening to this particular concert, the saxophone begins to improvise lines, and for the first time the images in my mind’s eye are spirals. When I tried to recall where I’d seen these spirals before, I realized they had the shape of the double helix. This discovery gave me the unifying image I needed to begin developing Molecular Systematic Music, drawing on the discoveries of molecular biology to offer a model for understanding one’s own musical DNA.
2nd Movement: MSM = DNA
I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man shows himself to be a true individual and is capable of going beyond the animal state.
- Marcel Duchamp
Molecular Systematic Music describes a twofold approach to music, braiding together the fundamentals of music theory with the ideas of molecular biology.
Our auditory perceptions are influenced and shaped by the wide range of cultural influences we’ve absorbed over the course of our musical and artistic education. While my formal studies exposed me to the history and techniques of the Western classical tradition, my own capacity for hearing had already been molded by listening to African American Spirituals, jazz, and the African American quilting tradition. The ideas and information embedded in every individual’s unique historical record results in a coded auditory perception. MSM offers musicians a way to discover their own musical DNA by examining their prior musical experiences, yielding a chart in the form of a “molecule” which may then be used to generate ideas for composition and improvisation.
The DNA double helix is composed of four basic chemicals which are contained in all living things: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine. These relate organically to the four basic triad groups: Major, Minor, Augmented, and the Diminished. These harmonic structures can be altered and shaped by one’s own intervalic relationship within those structures. By carefully examining each shard of glass, understanding one’s own relationship and response to it, one can begin gluing the pieces back together in heretofore unimagined shapes. While the result might not hold water, in its place a prism might illuminate one’s entire being.
My next column introduces the MSM system in greater detail.
James Brandon Lewis is a critically- acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation,Macdowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has been described as “ a saxophonist who embodies and transcends tradition” by The New York Times, and a promising young talent having listened to the elders by Jazz Legend Sonny Rollins. The saxophonist has balanced a deep, gospel -informed spirituality with Free-Jazz- abandon and hard-hitting funk-meets-hip-hop underpinning - Rolling Stone Magazine. He has released several critically-acclaimed albums, most recently highly touted 2021's Jesup Wagon and tours internationally leading several ensembles, and is a member and co-founder of American Book Award winning Ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders. James was recently voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat magazine's 2020s International Critics poll and most recently named top Tenor Saxophonist for 2021 by Jazz Times Magazine. Lewis attended Howard University, received his M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts and was recently named the Inaugural recipient of the Phd Fellowship in Creativity by the University of the Arts in collaboration with The Balvenie, drummer and Academy Award-Winning Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.