I agree with all the other posts about how refreshing and enjoyable it was to listen to more familiar music this week! I thought the time would never come that we would talk about a song that I already knew but that time has finally come! It’s especially nice after a few classes about atonal music (which , as I mentioned in class, I don’t really find “pleasant”). However, jazz is pretty much a 180 degree turn from atonal music for me. It’s familiar, fun, and extremely pleasant to listen to!

That being said, I found it extremely hard to notice patterns in the music like the ones we’ve been trying to learn about in class. This music is very different in a lot of ways than any of the other music we have been learning about in class. For example, with a sonata form, you always know exactly what you’re going to get next, but with jazz I feel like you never can really know. Jazz based a lot in improvisation and riffing and I think that makes it feel much more difficult to talk about academically  than other things we’ve been listening to. To me, it seems that jazz lacks the structure that the other music we’ve talked about throughout the semester has had and therefore I’m not really sure how to talk about it in the way we’ve talked about the other music this semester.