Theme 2: Composition of Music
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.