Equal Interval System courses offered at Pasadena City Colle

[jsaras]

Michael Mitacek is offering EIS instruction in a group setting at Pasadena City College. The courses are offered on Saturday mornings beginning this weekend.

 

Music 124AB covers Books 1 and 2 and is offered from 9-10 a.m.

 

Music 124C covers books 3 through 6 and meets from 10 to 1:30.

 

The positive: at $74 per class (16 weeks of instruction) plus books and PCC registration, the value is incredible.

 

The negative: It's group instruction. The folks in the class range from barely sober to a handful of EIS graduates who are re-taking the material. You are not going to receive the individualized attention you'd get by studying with David Blumberg.

 

Also, you're not doing all the assignments in the texts. Indeed, at the pace that the course moves (about twice as fast as in a private context), it's nearly impossible to do all the assignments even if you tried. Therefore, you are arguably not going to receive the entire benefit of working through the material.

 

For myself, I am doing both, private weekly studies with David Blumberg as well as the PCC course as a way to reinforce the material.

 

You can get more information at www.pasadena.edu

[linwood]

Very cool! It's hard to beat studying privately with db. Hey, but at least it will offer the course to some folks who wouldn't look into it otherwise. I do a lesson a week with db over the phone. I send him my .sib files and we go over them and talk about the what/why. I also bought all the cd's with the audio examples of each lesson. I've been doing it for 2.5 years every week and I'm about 1/3 of my way into book X and a couple months away from starting XI. It's a milestone for me. I'm pretty much a self taught guy and never had the chance to go to college, but managed to play all my life and do pretty well with it. You know, put two kids through college and have a roof over my head. I just want more doors to open and I wanna be able to write better and express myself better. The thing that was cool with EIS was that "it" doesn't care that I'm a self taught bozo. I'm taught the course the same way a conservatory graduate is taught EIS and there are many taking the course. If you know the names of the lines and spaces and what a whole note is, you're ready to start. Another cool thing, Dave's never made me feel that I was ever musically inadequate. If there's something I don't know or don't get, he explains it to me and believe me, there's tons of shit I don't know that needs to be explained. I don't talk about the course too much on the forum, it'd cause too many debates over theory and be unproductive and confusing to folks. I just mention this because I figure there are some members here that might like to take the course, that would like to know more about music and composition, but like I was when I first started, maybe doubt yourself a little and aren't sure if you could hang through it. It's like the course was written for a guy like me.

 

 

...oh and this is who dave is in case you're wondering

 

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_david_blumberg/

 

 

[VLH]

I'd never heard of the system; went to the Pasadena site and then on to the EIS site to read about it. I still don't have a clue as to what it's about--the site is kind of vague. Some nice score samples, though. What have both of you learned and how has the system changed (and improved) your approach to music? Has it helped your improvisation?

[linwood]

It's helped in numerous ways. I think that my arrs have gotten better and I can do them faster. It's really helped with my voice leading and the ways that I might voice chords for a certain sound. My orchestration is improving. It's also cleaned away some of the clutter that I had and things sound clearer now. I can see better opportunities for movement, lines to make, and how to get from one destination to another. I'm learning different instrument combinations to use for different textures and feels. I'm really looking forward to the next year or so because I'm starting to see improvements in my work. Since I did that arr of "so many stars" that's posted in the reharm thread, two more have come through the door that I've done for someone else. I never use to get that type of work. All that came from taking the course and being interested in learning how to move these notes around and to be able to adapt to different bags. The course is great for that.

[jsaras]

I'm only in Book 3 and my perspective is one of an advanced jazz pianist who is taking the course.

 

I've heard EIS described as the "unified field theory of music", which I think is fitting. It doesn't necessarily contradict of traditional theory, but it defintely takes you out of the "iii-vi-ii-V7-I" tonal box right away in a very logical fashion. You could use the techniques to write things that relate to the normal major/minor diatonic universe, but that's a passing consideration in the overall course.

 

Book 2, which seems to be the 'germ' of the course, is about voice-leading. You learn to write music 'one line at a time' using a basic technique which he calls "change of position, contrary to the bass".

 

"Equal Interval" refers to the bass notes (or "root tones"). The initial assignments are a series of controlled experiments writing voice-led progressions of a single chord type over the various Equal Interval bass line movements (half-steps, whole steps, minor thirds, major thirds, perfect fourths and split-octave) both ascending and descending. Various techniques for altering the individual voices are explored along the way. This basic concept is explored to its limits by the end of Book 2 so that you can basically voice-lead any chord to any other chord. I guess you could say that it's an expanded version of figured bass.

 

From a writing perspective, it continues to open many fresh harmonic doors that I knew little or nothing about. I've even picked up some chord types/voicing that I never thought of using before, which is no small feat for an advanced jazz pianist like me. The neat thing is that it's not just the usual case of "here's a wierd chord, play it in parallel fashion through the cycle of fifths", you actually get to understand how to use those structures, resolve them and voice-lead them.

 

As far as in improvisational concept, that has been a little slower on the uptake for me. 99% of my jazz playing has been centered on the iii-vi-ii-V7-I/major key/minor key/blues/standards universe. The closed position structures used in the book (3,5,7,9; 5,7,9,11; 7,9,11,13; etc,) are basically rootless structures, but they're not used in the way you'd typically play on "Autumn Leaves", so my normal muscle memory is useless in this context. This dog's gotta learn some new tricks with the left hand. However, once it's comfortable I'll be doing things that'll make Fred Hersch drool!

 

The system also uses several unusual scales, again, not part of my vocabulary yet.

 

 

 

[jsaras]

There's nothing like resurrecting an old thread like this, but I've finally gotten around to editing some short clips of the Equal Interval System mostly in jazzy contexts: https://jonasaras.wordpress.com/music-equal-interval-system-eis-examples/

 

Cheers,

[Dave Ferris]

Very nice writing Jonas. I hear a Brecker/Mintzer-ish influence as well. Nice playing all around too. Congrats.

[Ulf]

EIS was completely new to me (thanks a lot for the links!). I have very little formal training after high school, so I'm looking into learning something fresh from this.