Third Stream Music

The other day I came up with the concept of ‘Third Stream Music,’ to describe what I was doing compositionally. By this I meant the stream of so-called ‘classical music’ combining with ‘pop’ or ‘jazz’ music.

One cannot ignore the cultures behind these; one might be called ‘refined or civilized,’ and one might be referred to as ‘more primitive or freer.’ I really started thinking about these concepts when I heard a radio interview with the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who said something to the effect that he admired American jazz and was working to incorporate this ‘primitivism’ into his own musical compositions.

And I thought, well yes, hasn’t this been the conflict all along? Both sides have their negative and positive aspects and each side is guilty of magnifying the negative aspects of the other; you can be ‘civilized’ into a slave state and ‘primitive’ just means they don’t know any better. Or does it?

I decided to Google ‘Third Stream Music’ because I felt that someone before had certainly also arrived at this terminology.

Sure enough; Gunther Schuller, who was a composer, coined the term in 1957 in a lecture at Brandeis University. You can read more about this here; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_stream

Critics on either side complained that Third Stream Music violated their ‘traditions’ and diluted the purity of their genres.

Interestingly, Mr. Schuller defined what Third Stream Music was not, going on to say it was not jazz with strings, jazz played on “classical” instruments, classical music played by jazz players, not inserting a bit of Ravel or Schoenburg between bebop changes-or the reverse (lol!), jazz in fugal form or a fugue played by jazz players.

Curiously these are all things that have been tried in the past (mainly by the ‘classic’ camp as their audience began to desert them and symphony orchestras started going broke.)

These sorts of efforts do fall flat. It’s kind of like putting a Rolls grill on a VW.

I don’t think you can just set out to mix the two. It has to come from a genuine intention to expand one genre or the other. That’s why I think Stravinsky was the most successful at it.

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