Marc Hannaford, assistant professor of music theory, has recently published a research article in Music Theory Online, a journal of the Society for Music Theory. Titled “Eric Dolphy’s and Yusef Lateef’s Synthetic Formations,” the article explores music theory in Lateef and Dolphy’s creative practice, amid the social and collaborative “Black study” of the burgeoning jazz experimentalism of 1960s New York City.
The abstract states:
This article focuses on a “synthetic scale” reproduced in Yusef Lateef’s Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns and attributed to Eric Dolphy. Linking music theory, jazz studies, and Black performance theory, I deploy archival research and meta-theoretical analysis to discuss the various music-theoretical, creative, social, and political resonances of this entry. The article positions Dolphy’s scale and Lateef’s engagement with it as a testament to the communal “Black study” of 1960s jazz, implicates music theory in contemporaneous issues regarding racial politics, and explores how music theory informs creative practice in these musicians’ work.
Hannaford’s article “Eric Dolphy’s and Yusef Lateef’s Synthetic Formations” is open access and is available online.