THE COLLABORATIVE ARRANGEMENTS OF ALICE PARKER AND ...

there is not one instance in the entire catalogue where harmony outranks melody and
counterpoint as the structural principle.
Dr. Parker agrees with Jones’ observation:
Ann's comment is right on. That is still the principal difference between my own composing and
most of what I see around me. I was really unhappy at being restricted by harmonic ‘rules’ when
I was trying to find my own voice, and soon realized that if I adopted the Renaissance view that
harmony was the vertical result of moving contrapuntal voices, even in tonal music, I was freed
from that constraint. 54
Parker’s Preference for Melodies Comprised of Gapped Scales and Modes
The second half of Parker’s quote here leads us into a discussion of her preference for
gapped scales and modality over tonality. She cites two particular advantages to working within
a modal context: 55 1) The arranger is free from tonal melodic tendencies, especially of the fourth
step wanting to resolve down to the third, and of the seventh step wanting to resolve up to the
tonic note; and 2) chords in a modal milieu are not required to relate to one another according to
their roles in functional harmony (tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, etc.) She says,
Tonality demands honoring…’leading tones’—i.e., B must always lead to C. The G7 chord
wants to resolve down a fifth to C, allowing the B to move to C, and the F to E. This was the
problem which so bedeviled me after college, when I was trying to figure out a compositional
language for myself. How could I escape this ‘leading’? Adding more 3rds to the triads
(Debussy, modern jazz) just compounds the problem, it doesn't solve it. I found that by going
back to 16th c. modality, I could get back to C just being C, without implying anything else.
Modal scales resolve most often through neighboring tones (Amen: DEDC D.) Tonal scales
resolve down a fifth. 56
54 Parker, email communication with author, 21 Jul. 2010.
55 By the term “modal,” we refer here both the church modes and to any scale other than the major scale and the
three minor scales that require adherence to the rules of 18th century counterpoint. This includes gapped scales,
such as the pentatonic and hexatonic.
56 Parker, email communication with author, 29 Dec. 2011. Dr. Don Fader, musicologist at the University of
Alabama, takes issue with Parker at this point. He says: “[Parker is] actually quite wrong about these implications;
but she’s a composer and not a historian. Certain modes, e.g., Phrygian, are bedeviled by problems of pitch
tendencies of the kind she thinks don’t exist. It’s a very common instance of the modernist desire to view the past as
a kind of lost paradise of tonal innocence. These guys were anything but innocent.” (Fader, email communication
with author, 13 Apr. 2012).
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