Effects of the Difference in Accented Beat Between Jazz and Classical Music Styles Through Sight-Reading of a Jazz Ad-Lib Solo

Abstract

The author conducted a survey to determine classical music performers’ rhythm and phrase recognition scores based on sight-reading of a jazz ad-lib solo. Classical music performers generally take the 1st and 3rd quarter as accented beats when performing 4/4 beat phrases. However, jazz performers generate their ad-lib phrases, taking the 2nd and 4th quarter as accented beats. Thus, for the classical music performers, sight-reading of a generated jazz phrase is difficult.

In this paper, the author reports the findings of a survey conducted to determine the processes undertaken by classical music performers during sight-reading of jazz blues ad-lib phrases while interchanging the accented beats. The targeted ad-lib phrase is Charlie Parker’s blues solo which was given a musical notated score. For the first time, the performers were to sight-read the target ad-lib phrase, counting off beat (2nd and 4th quarter) as accented beat, according to the jazz style. The second time, the performers did a similar sight-reading, counting on beat (1st and 3rd quarter) as accented beat, according to a normal classical style. For the third time, the performers did the sight-reading while counting all quarters. The performers recorded the stumbling phrases for each of their attempted varied counts. As a result, most performers recorded different stumbling phrases of both the jazz and classical counting styles. These results indicate that the difference in beat counting and accented beat, between the classical music and jazz style, affected their recognition of the ad-lib phrases.