Behind the Scenes of a Study on Jazz, Concert Music, and Musical Languages
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Jul 14
- 16 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
How Blurred Distinctions, my doctoral dissertation in composition at the University of Miami, came to be.
In 2017, my doctoral dissertation in Jazz Composition at the University of Miami was published under the title Blurred Distinctions; Beyond Third Stream – A Study in Composition of Confluent Hybrid Musical Styles: The Amalgam of Jazz and Classical Concert Music.
The study investigated the relationships among jazz, concert music, and other musical traditions through analyses of works by Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, and John Psathas, complemented by interviews with composers, arrangers, and musicians working in these territories where musical languages converge. As part of the research, I composed and recorded an original work for symphonic jazz orchestra titled Seven Masks.
Although the dissertation was completed during my doctoral studies, the questions that gave rise to it go back much further.
My interest in the relationships among different musical traditions began while I was still an undergraduate composition student at UNICAMP. At the time, I was already interested in the boundaries between popular music and concert music, the ways in which different musical languages interacted, and the difficulty of placing certain works within rigid categories.
This interest even emerged during my undergraduate research project. When I began discussing possible research topics, one of the ideas under consideration already involved questions similar to those that would later give rise to Blurred Distinctions. At that point, however, the project seemed too broad for the scope of an undergraduate research project. After discussing it with my advisor, it made more sense to direct the research toward the language of the Brazilian big band, a more clearly defined topic that was better suited to the stage I was at.
The original question, however, remained. It surfaced not only in academic contexts, but also in the music I listened to, studied, wrote, and helped produce.
Over the years, I continued to notice how many of the artists who most captured my interest seemed to occupy spaces that were difficult to define. Some moved between improvisation and composition. Others worked simultaneously with elements associated with jazz, concert music, popular music, or specific folk traditions. In many cases, their works seemed more complex than the categories typically used to describe them.
This difficulty also appeared in the way my own trajectory was beginning to be described. I had been nominated for a Latin Grammy as a classical music composer while studying jazz composition. Both definitions corresponded to genuine aspects of my education and my work, but their coexistence reinforced a question that had been with me for years: to what extent can the categories used to describe an artist represent what that artist actually does?
This was not because the research created this interest, but because it offered an institutional framework capable of bringing focus and depth to an investigation that was already part of my artistic practice. The DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) format has a particularly interesting characteristic in this regard. Unlike exclusively musicological research, a DMA seeks to integrate artistic creation and academic investigation within a single project. The goal was not merely to study these questions theoretically, but also to explore them through musical practice and composition.
It also allowed me to systematically document and examine discussions that frequently remain confined to musical practice by interviewing composers whose work I admired and documenting their creative processes.
The University of Miami also provided an especially favorable environment for this type of project. Its integration with the Henry Mancini Institute offered access to musicians, large instrumental ensembles, archives, and studios within a setting where jazz and orchestral writing were already part of everyday practice.
Opportunities to write and record an original work for symphonic jazz orchestra with substantial artistic freedom are extremely rare. In the professional world, commissions for large ensembles are usually tied to parameters involving duration, instrumentation, style, aesthetics, concept, or curatorial direction. These guidelines may be more or less flexible, but they generally exist before the composition process begins and establish certain expectations for the result.
In this case, the doctoral program offered a different set of conditions. I could define the work’s own parameters, experiment with ideas, and explore compositional paths with greater freedom, taking the research questions and my artistic interests as points of departure. This degree of autonomy is usually a privilege reserved for a small number of composers, generally those at more advanced stages of their careers with already established reputations. Having access to it as part of my final doctoral project made the opportunity especially rare and meaningful to me.
In many respects, Blurred Distinctions was less the beginning of an investigation than the formalization of a conversation that had already been unfolding for many years.
An Investigation That Was Already Underway
When the research began to take shape between 2013 and 2014, many of the questions I intended to investigate were already emerging naturally in my work as a composer and arranger.
During that period, I was already working on projects that moved between different musical worlds and demanded precisely the kind of reflection that would later become the focus of the dissertation. In many cases, the practical question came before the academic one. Before trying to understand theoretically how different traditions could interact, I was already confronting that challenge in my musical writing.
An important example was my participation in Jazz and the Philharmonic, a project presented through the Henry Mancini Institute. The project brought together a symphony orchestra and musicians associated with the jazz world in a repertoire built around this very convergence of musical languages.
For that occasion, I composed Spanish Suite, a new work conceived as both an arrangement and a dialogue between two compositions from different musical traditions: Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, for guitar and orchestra, and Spain, by Chick Corea, one of the most important figures in the history of modern jazz. Both works are presented and reworked throughout the suite, establishing new musical relationships with one another.
My interest in this kind of encounter extended beyond musical language.
What attracted me was observing how different traditions could coexist within the same work without any of them having to be abandoned. The point was not to turn jazz into concert music or concert music into jazz. My interest lay in the creative possibilities that emerged when these languages began to share the same space.
Looking back, I realize that many of the subjects discussed in Blurred Distinctions were already present in those earlier projects. The research did not emerge to explain something I was not yet doing. It emerged because I wanted to understand more deeply the questions that were already appearing continuously in my artistic practice.
For the first time, I would be able to devote several years to the in-depth study of scores and different compositional approaches while simultaneously developing an original work in dialogue with the reflections produced during the research. As the analyses and interviews deepened the investigation, Seven Masks became the space in which I could respond artistically to some of the questions that motivated the project.
Why Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, and John Psathas?
One of the first decisions in the research was determining which composers would be used as case studies.
I was looking for composers whose work related to the research’s central questions and represented different forms of dialogue among jazz, concert music, and other musical traditions.
Through specific works, the three selected composers made it possible to examine different approaches to writing for large ensembles in dialogue with improvisation, orchestration, and distinct musical traditions.
Maria Schneider and Vince Mendoza were two names already on my radar. Schneider had been a direct influence on my writing for many years and was one of the figures who had inspired me to pursue further studies in the United States. Mendoza was connected to my experience at the Metropole Orkest’s International Arrangers Workshop and represented a world of writing for symphonic jazz orchestras that had always interested me.
John Psathas emerged as a necessary counterpoint. While Schneider and Mendoza came from backgrounds more closely connected to jazz, Psathas came primarily from contemporary concert music. His inclusion broadened the research’s palette and made it possible to observe how territories where musical languages converge could also be reached from a different point of departure.
Maria Schneider has developed one of the most influential voices in contemporary writing for jazz orchestra. Her music engages with the big band tradition while also incorporating references drawn from a variety of cultures and musical languages.
Vince Mendoza represented another possible path. His career as a composer, arranger, and musical director brought him into contact with artists from many different musical worlds. Over the decades, he has written for big bands, symphony orchestras, jazz groups, studio recordings, and popular artists working in a wide range of styles. His music frequently draws on resources associated with both improvisation and the orchestral tradition, without making those elements seem as though they belong to separate worlds.
John Psathas offered a different perspective from those of Schneider and Mendoza. My encounter with his work Omnifenix revealed writing that combined improvisation, rhythmic energy, and elements of contemporary jazz with orchestral techniques connected to his background in concert music. His work also incorporates influences from Greek musical tradition and a wide range of other cultural references.
From Scores to Interviews
To conduct the analyses, I needed to gather the scores of the selected works. Many of them had been officially published and were available through catalogs. The University of Miami’s library and repository, as well as the Henry Mancini Institute’s archive, facilitated my access to the necessary material.
Scores reveal a great deal about a work, but they do not necessarily explain how particular decisions were made, which experiences influenced a composer, or how the composer understands their own relationship with different musical traditions.
For this reason, the interviews occupied a central place in the project. They broadened the scope of the musical analysis by incorporating the composers’ own perspectives on their choices, references, and creative processes.
The preparation for each interview began with the observations I had already developed about each composer’s work and trajectory. There was no identical set of questions applied in the same way to everyone. Each interview outline was developed according to the work of the individual creator, always in relation to the dissertation’s central questions and also to issues I recognized from my own experience as a composer.
Within this personalized approach, certain questions ran through the conversations: how each composer understood the boundaries among jazz, concert music, and popular or regional traditions; how they wrote for musicians trained in different practices; and how they approached notation, improvisation, syncopation, sonic balance, and rhythmic articulation.
The interviews also addressed the relationship between soloists and orchestra, the differences between writing for small and large ensembles, the role of each instrumental family, and ways of integrating different musical languages without reducing one of them to a superficial element within the work.
From this core, each conversation moved toward specific aspects of the interviewee’s work, such as formal construction, melodic and harmonic development, cultural references, instrumentation choices, and compositional processes.
How the Interviews Took Place
The circumstances in which these conversations took place also varied. Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, and Terence Blanchard all visited the University of Miami while I was conducting the research. In addition to the formal interviews, I had the opportunity to attend rehearsals, classes, workshops, and various academic activities connected to their artistic residencies. As a fellow of the Henry Mancini Institute, I was able to observe these musicians working at close range in both professional and educational settings.
Gary Lindsay was also a fundamental presence in the project. In addition to serving as my dissertation advisor, he had a professional trajectory that directly intersected with many of the questions discussed in the research. His experience as a composer, arranger, and educator offered a perspective that complemented those of the other interviewees.
André Mehmari became part of the research through a different path. I had followed his work for years and considered his perspective especially relevant to a discussion of musical language, improvisation, and aesthetic boundaries. When the opportunity arose to meet him during one of his visits to Miami, I took the occasion to conduct the interview.
John Psathas was the only interviewee who required a trip specifically for that purpose. When I learned that he would be in New York for personal reasons, I arranged a trip to the city to meet him. He was extremely generous in setting aside some of his time for our conversation.
Many of their responses opened paths I had not anticipated and led the conversations toward other aspects of the creative process. These changes in direction enriched the research and broadened my perspective as a music creator.
What the Interviews Revealed
The interviews addressed subjects related to composition, improvisation, musical education, artistic influences, and these musicians’ relationships with different musical traditions. Their purpose was not to replace the analysis of the works, but to complement the study of the scores and recordings with direct accounts from the artists themselves.
Maria Schneider discussed her natural relationship with repertoires typically associated with different musical worlds, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, jazz, and the American popular song tradition. John Psathas discussed the difficulty of using terms such as “jazz” and “classical music” precisely, since both have come to encompass an enormous variety of practices. Vince Mendoza, through his own trajectory working with artists, orchestras, and groups from different musical contexts, offered a perspective directly connected to the kind of interaction among musical languages investigated in the dissertation.
These accounts helped situate the analyses within a broader context of artistic practice, musical education, and professional experience.
The ideas that emerged from these conversations and from the analyses of the works are discussed in greater depth in the article devoted to the conclusions of Blurred Distinctions. Behind the scenes of the research, the decisive factor was the ability to pose these questions directly to the artists and allow their answers to broaden the path of the investigation.
Seven Masks: Composition as Part of the Research
In addition to its theoretical investigation, the doctoral project included a fundamental creative component. The research did not end with the analyses and interviews. It also had to take form in an original work. Seven Masks emerged in this context.
The initial idea was ambitious. The project envisioned a seven-movement suite, with each movement inspired by a different narrative archetype. Each movement would have a central character represented by a solo instrument and would explore its own sonic world.
More than illustrating characters, the intention was to use these archetypes as points of departure for distinct musical investigations.
As the research progressed, however, it became clear that completing a work of this scale in its entirety within the doctoral timeline would be extremely difficult. In addition to the work of composition, there were all the logistics involved in preparing scores and parts, rehearsing, coordinating musicians, recording sessions, and post-production.
My advisor, Gary Lindsay, then suggested that I concentrate my efforts on three movements. This approach allowed me to fully develop the central ideas of the research without compromising the quality of the final result.
That is how the completed version of Seven Masks came to include only three archetypes: Mentor, Trickster, and Threshold Guardians.
The work was written for a symphonic jazz ensemble combining a full symphony orchestra with a jazz big band.
The recording took place at the University of Miami and featured primarily musicians from the Frost School of Music and fellows from the Henry Mancini Institute. Many of the participants were graduate students, teaching assistants, and young professionals who moved naturally among different musical traditions, precisely the kind of musician discussed throughout the research itself.
This reading of Threshold Guardians (pictured above) was an exception within the process. There was no series of complete rehearsals with the entire orchestra before the recording. Most of the musicians arrived at the studio without having previously heard the works as a whole.
To make the project possible, the recording was divided into separate sessions. The big band, rhythm section, woodwinds, strings, orchestral percussion, and soloists were recorded in stages. Each new session depended on the previous ones, using click tracks, edits, and preliminary mixes as references for the musicians recording next.
This process required me to evaluate each group in isolation while keeping the complete result of the work in my imagination. My training in Studio Jazz Writing and my experience with audio became essential. Composition, conducting, musical direction, and production all became part of the same undertaking.
The composition process was deeply influenced by the subjects investigated in the dissertation, but not in the sense of reproducing the musical language of Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, or John Psathas. The goal was never to imitate the composers I studied.
Rather than reproducing a specific aesthetic, I was interested in investigating different musical worlds and understanding which creative possibilities emerged from working within them.
The influence took place more broadly, through the exploration of the possibilities opened up by the coexistence of different musical traditions.
Each movement ultimately became an investigation of its own. Trickster offers a clear example of this process. The movement engages directly with the world of jazz, with swing, and with a sense of play and unpredictability associated with the archetype itself. At the same time, it incorporates techniques connected to twelve-tone music and a recurring exploration of the tritone. The result produced a sound that some people associated with the musical world of Leonard Bernstein.
One of these associations occurred in a particularly memorable way.
Following the world premiere of Trickster by the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra of Los Angeles, presented as part of a composition competition in which the movement received an honorable mention, someone came to speak with me and said that the piece had transported them into a sonic world reminiscent of Bernstein.
It was not a conscious reference during the composition process. Once I heard the observation, however, it immediately seemed plausible.
The comment caught my attention because Bernstein had always been a composer I admired precisely for his ability to move among different musical worlds. He was a composer deeply connected to the concert music tradition, but he also wrote musicals, engaged with jazz, and developed a language that is difficult to reduce to a single category.
Threshold Guardians followed a different direction.
In this movement, the exploration is closer to contemporary concert music, focusing on textures, contrasts in timbre, and the coexistence of modal and atonal elements.
Mentor, in turn, occupies another space within the work. The movement engages more directly with the jazz orchestra tradition and also serves as a tribute to Gary Lindsay himself. In many respects, its aesthetic is closer to the musical world of composers such as Gil Evans, Maria Schneider, and other writers who helped expand the possibilities of musical language.
The three movements ultimately followed very different directions. Each explored a distinct sonic world and addressed specific musical questions. In this sense, Seven Masks functioned as a space for artistic experimentation running parallel to the investigation developed in the dissertation.
The recording process made it clear that the score was only one part of bringing the work to life. The result also depended on the musicians’ familiarity with different musical languages and on how clearly I was able to communicate articulation, phrasing, and musical intention in each session.
The musicians of the Henry Mancini Institute had especially flexible backgrounds, but the swing of Trickster came more naturally to the members of the big band and required greater adaptation from some of the string and woodwind players. In Mentor, the slower tempo and ballad character reduced this difficulty. Threshold Guardians followed another path: it did not depend on swing phrasing and employed a more cinematic style of writing, characterized by high-impact attacks, the exploration of sonic textures, and the use of atonal materials and serial techniques combined with modality.
The musicians’ versatility coexisted with distinct backgrounds and musical experiences. When the writing drew on very different idiomatic languages and conventions, the performance challenges manifested themselves differently for each musician.
An Unfinished Work and an Investigation That Continues
Although Seven Masks fulfilled its purpose within the doctoral project, it remains an unfinished work to this day.
The original plan envisioned seven movements, but the version completed during the research included only three. The remaining archetypes were planned, discussed, and partially sketched, but they were never completed.
At the time, the decision made perfect sense. The priority was to complete a work expansive enough to serve as the dissertation’s artistic component without turning the project into something logistically impossible to realize. Writing for a symphonic jazz orchestra already represented a considerable challenge. The recording involved dozens of musicians, the preparation of materials, studio availability, and the coordination of schedules.
Concentrating my efforts on three movements allowed me to explore the central ideas of the research in greater depth and complete the project within the expected timeframe.
Even so, the sense of incompleteness never entirely disappeared. Seven Masks was never merely a piece. It also always functioned as a laboratory of possibilities.
Each movement explored a different territory. Each archetype served as a point of departure for investigating sonorities, forms of musical organization, and relationships among distinct musical languages. In many respects, the work reflected a characteristic that remains present in much of my work as a composer: an interest in exploring different musical worlds instead of developing a single aesthetic or a single way of writing music.
Many of my compositions emerge as investigations, opportunities to explore specific musical worlds, understand particular creative processes, or move closer to sonorities that awaken my artistic curiosity.
Seven Masks is a clear representation of this way of working. The piece does not seek to demonstrate a definitive musical language, but to explore possibilities. Its unfinished state also reflects the fact that the questions that motivated the research are still present.
I remain interested in artists who move between traditions, in works that do not fit comfortably within a single category, and in new forms of dialogue among improvisation, composition, Brazilian music, jazz, concert music, and other influences that form part of my trajectory.
The questions that gave rise to the research remain open. Nearly a decade after completing my doctorate, I still want to return to Seven Masks, finish the movements that were left behind, and discover what they have to say.
The dissertation was completed. The conversation was not.
About the Author
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is a composer, arranger, music director, and educator. A Latin Grammy-nominated composer and recipient of multiple international awards, including 13 DownBeat Awards and honors from ASCAP, he develops artistic projects that connect Brazilian music, jazz, orchestral writing, improvisation, recording production, research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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