Harmolodics
| Harmolodic Inc. | |
|---|---|
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| Founded | 1995 |
| Founder | Ornette Coleman, Denardo Coleman |
| Distributor(s) | Verve/PolyGram |
| Genre | Jazz, spoken word |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Location | Harlem, New York |
Harmolodics is the musical philosophy and compositional/improvisational method of jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. It is therefore associated with avant-garde jazz and free jazz, although its implications extend beyond these limits. Coleman's work following this philosophy during the late 1970s and 1980s inspired a style of free-thinking jazz funk known as "harmolodic funk". Coleman also used the name "Harmolodic" for both his first website and his record label.
Coleman defined harmolodics as "the use of the physical and the mental of one's own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group." Applied to the particulars of music, this means that "harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas." (see: aspects of music)
Harmolodics seeks to free musical compositions from any tonal center, allowing harmonic progression independent of traditional European notions of tension and release (see: atonality). Harmolodics may loosely be defined as an expression of music in which harmony, movement of sound, and melody all share the same value. The general effect is that music achieves an immediately open expression, without being constrained by tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules.
Ronald Radano suggests that Coleman's concepts of harmonic unison and harmolodics were influenced by Pierre Boulez's theory of aleatory while Gunther Schuller suggested that harmolodics is based on the superimposition of the same or similar phrases, thus creating polytonality and heterophony.
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