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Abstract

Jazz has often intersected with world-music vocabularies, producing rich and diverse musical fusions. This thesis extends that lineage through the pursuit of radical originality, introducing new compositional systems—including ethnoserialism, rhythm rows, Morse code integration, and awareness composition—each intended to push the boundaries of contemporary music. A mixed, practice-based methodology combines analytical score study, iterative composition-improvisation, and semi-structured interviews with masters. Serial rows, Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, and Balkan rhythmic frameworks serve as creative constraints, pushing the music beyond habitual harmonic and metric choices. The outcome is a portfolio of 15 original compositions that serve as practical case studies for these compositional models, alongside a written thesis that documents the process in detail. The findings demonstrate that deliberate and multidimensional constraint—applied to melody, harmony, and rhythm—can unlock sound worlds rarely accessed in current jazz or contemporary classical practice. While not claiming to have invented a genre, this work contributes the foundations for what could become a new branch of exploratory music—rooted in jazz, informed by academic rigor, and driven by the desire to imagine music not yet heard.

Publication Date

7-1-2025

Campus

Valencia (Spain) Campus

Keywords

Ethnoserialism; Rhythm row; Morse Code; Post Tonal Jazz; Creative Constraints

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Music I haven't yet heard - Contemporary Creative Strategies

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