These were the final two projects for my senior fall music class, Jazz Harmony and Arranging. It was my first time ever actually exploring jazz from a performance or compositional standpoint, and while I had a great experience it's clear there's still a good amount for me to learn.
Autumn Leaves Arrangement
For our final project, we were given a bit more freedom to design an original piece or design a unique arrangement of a jazz standard. I chose to do the latter with the tune Autumn Leaves, taking the melody and harmonic structure but attempting to present them in a new way.
This was my last music project as an undergraduate student, so I wanted some way to synthesize my previous classes in classical and counterpoint composition with my introduction to jazz. The way I tried (emphasis on tried) to do this was to create a short fugue section using the melody of Autumn Leaves as my subject.
The end result was a bit questionable with a lot of counterpoint norms being violated but thankfully I can wave those rules away by saying "it's jazz." Even though I'm finished with formally studying music, I'm hoping to have plenty more experiences in composition after graduating to improve my fluency both with fugues and jazz composition.
Attica
One of our final projects in this class was to create a contrafact of a pre-existing jazz tune, basically to create an "original" piece from the skeleton of a harmonic progression from another song. For my project I chose to use the chord progressions from John Coltrane's Vilia.
