The inner workings of harmony have always tickled my fancy. Especially the mechanisms that broaden the notions of common practice tonality. Given my somewhat eclectic background, spanning jazz, rock, and classical music, paired with a proclivity for music analysis and composition, my attention was inevitably drawn to the notion of Upper Structures (USs). This term was originally coined within the jazz sphere, however, the
phenomenon it describes pertains to a wide variety of music genres.
I’ve been ruminating on the topic of USs since I first learned about them in my first year of high school. In my mind, I had stumbled upon a gold mine. The breadth of harmonic possibilities afforded to a tonal framework suddenly multiplied exponentially, and not exclusively in jazz practice. Harmonic artifacts pertaining to modernist pieces that once boggled my mind suddenly clicked into place. This knowledge also prompted me to experiment with the concept of USs in original compositions, one of which will be picked apart in this thesis. Most of all, I speculated that, for the right repertoire, USs could be of great assistance as an analytical instrument, which could then be transferred into one’s performance. This proved to be especially true whenever I encountered Ravel’s body of work.
As a performer, I’ve always had a strong penchant for musical analysis because I believe that, ideally, analysis done properly should steer one’s interpretation. That is not to say intuition has no place in a performer’s arsenal. On the contrary, it should be one’s starting point. Miguel Ribeiro Pereira, an old teacher of mine, once proffered: “Análise é a objetivação da arte” [Analysis is but the objectivization of art]. Indeed, analysis refines
intuition. Hence, when I intuited harmonic elements in Ravel’s oeuvre had meanings that could not readily be described with my former knowledge on extended tonality, the notion of USs facilitated the vinculum between my musical instinct and my analytical rationale.
All in all, my interest lies in understanding where and how upper structures fit within the hierarchy of perceived harmonic relations, attractions, stability, and directionality; and how it navigates the borders of later concepts such as expanded tonality and polytonality. In other words, where, in extended harmony, do upper structures thrive
