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• 1 media/Albert_Gleizes,_1915,_Composition_pour_Jazz,_oil_on_cardboard,_73_x_73_cm,_Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum,_New_York_DSC00542.jpg 2016-04-27T16:24:19-07:00 Theme 2: Composition of Music 11 Jane Ira Bloom and Maria Schneider's world of composition and their processes collide. plain 2016-05-09T18:17:58-07:00            Jane Ira Bloom and Maria Schneider although educated differently in their lifetime of jazz each agree on a freeing process of composition and have similar practices and inspirations to spur their writing. With traditional musical education, it would be assumed that Maria Schneider relies on a conventional way of producing music, however she is a firm believer against the “traditional” sense of sitting down and writing melodies in barred lines, as it seems less authentic. In her interview with Monk Rowe, she states, “…when you sit down to compose it’s very easy to have this grid…. And so for me what I try to do is make my music about experience and throw away that grid” (lines 194-199). Throwing away “the grid” allows Schneider to focus on pulling inspiration from her childhood, as that is where her passion for music began and was the purest.  She reflects, “I was always full of fantasy in my music. And you know when you’re a child you experience disappointment for the first time, sadness, romantic love maybe, intensity, fear, all the emotions you have are the most intense in your childhood, because that’s the first experience you have. So many things touch you then. So I always go back to that” (lines 170-173). She draws her music on her experiences and that is her end goal of her compositions: to have her music reflect her lifetime. Similarly to Bloom, Schneider’s objective is to inspire and have her music take on a life of its own. She describes her motives and process best when she said, “I’m trying to get some feeling inside me out or some kind of experience or some kind of vibration, something, and codify it in sound, to transport other people to that same place. So I’m not just trying to create interesting sound, I’m trying to transport an experience through music” (lines 176-179).
   
              Instead of relying purely on experiences to motivate her compositions, Jane Ira Bloom focuses on what interests her in the moment to draw inspiration. Bloom prides herself as being a developed improviser so her writings are reflections of her talent of improvisation. When asked about her titles of songs she has written, Bloom answers, “I think because I think that it’s an improviser’s job to reflect and react to their own time, that those titles reflects the scope of things that interest me today, you know, in the 1990s. And I let them affect what I think about as a jazz player” (lines 42-44). While Schneider pulls inspirations from her childhood, Bloom emphasizes the importance of her interests. However both are very similar in their stress on the significance of freedom in jazz and composition. Bloom remembers her first time writing her own music as being purely improvisational with no traditional writing on barred lines and no structure. She reflects on this autonomy in her interview with Monk Rowe saying, “But you know also there was a sense, even as a kid I understood the sensibility about the freedom that was involved in expressing yourself as a jazz player” (lines 112-113). Like Schneider, she loves jazz for the fluidity, passion, and soul behind it rather than having merely structure and mechanics. This passion and gracefulness of jazz allows Bloom to internalize her music and she describes it as “the page goes away and the tune is then inside me” (line 214). The emotion and fanaticism behind the art of jazz is what drove Bloom and Schneider’s infatuation with it. While their upbringings and their entrance into jazz differed, both women agree on the preservation of the freedom and soul in composition, and that is what continues to drive their desire to compose.