What does harmony mean to me? Well, nothing in and of itself. As a composer/improvisor I am trying to construct a cosmos – give out a vibration and get across a worldview. What is called harmony in Western music is just one tool to do the above.

The dictionary would say harmony is something like “the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce chords or chord progressions”, or “an orderly or pleasing arrangement of parts.” So what. All that is important to me as an artist is to tap into my imagination and so called harmony is one tool to do that. Now, I am a pianist and obviously harmony is a part of the piano experience, and no matter how deep my imagination is, it would be almost impossible to overlook the whole history of harmony as it relates to my instrument. Maybe best to do an archaeology of where I am coming from with this.

I guess I use harmony to build drama – as bricks in my sacred architecture. There are some images in my subconscious that are not genre-specific but relate to the poetics of how I use harmony. There are also sources I went to to gather material in my early years and synthesize all of it together, to create the network of original harmonic sequences I employ in the dramatic way that I do it.

Some non-genre images relate to my harmonic sense. I have always viewed the notes on the piano like what is called Indra’s Net in Hinduism – an infinite web of entangled particles. To me the notes move in nature in a constant counterpoint and create new clustered entities by virtue of natural kinetic thrust. This is a process I’ve always sought to uncover and exploit in my own way. The best example of this in Western music might be a Bach fugue, but I am always trying to push to the extreme of the physics of this idea. The piano can create actual entities that are clustered pillars of tone that bypass Western analysis.

The next image in my head would be the image of a piano being dropped from a spaceship to Earth and me being able to experience the overtones once it was dropped. In fact, heaven to me would be to be enveloped by all the overtones the piano is capable of emitting, but to infinity.

Now looking back, where did I go to get basic source material? Well let’s separate them into jazz sources and classical sources for the sake of this piece.

As far as jazz sources, one of the major ideas in the idiom is chords as an obstacle course to play through, as done in bebop and building that to the ultimate obstacle course of a construction of massive chord changes as Coltrane did with “Giant Steps” and “Countdown”. In this way you are dealing with a sheets of sound concept, meaning trying to exhaust all the possibilities and also dealing with the interchangeability and relativity of the harmonic information.

I believe that there is no such thing as playing over changes – that it is all perturbations on a pulse – that emit out of a continuum or a solid state background or a field. This is what is implied in the field effect of a post-Coltrane universe – if you can get away from trying to affect the sound of Coltrane and his band and get to the pure physics of where the language wants to go. Also related to the Coltrane universe, one can be inspired by pianist McCoy Tyner’s rolling impressionistic sound – albeit he Africanised it. There are ways to apply this without copying McCoy. This has nothing to do with the extension of the “Giant Steps”/“Countdown” paradigm into pure pulse like late Coltrane. It’s just another piece of the Coltrane puzzle.

The second source of harmonic information is the concept of Ellingtonian elegance. This is mainly a factor of taste and artistic instinct. It is locating a chord voicing that is, for lack of a better term, sexy. It has to do with the choice of notes – the touch and attack on the piano, the way you can make the chord ring. This is something internal.

The third source of jazz harmony info is the paradigm of how to voice a chord that comes out of a Bill Evans mindset. There is no need to get into particulars on this, but there are plenty of jazz pianists who are on this path. For me it served as a backdrop to take me somewhere else. I maintain the love of an exquisitely voiced Bill Evans chord, but for me it is in service to building a whole different type of architecture.

So what are the main classical sources for me? Well, Debussy preludes were always a colourfield I loved to take a bath in. Alexander Scriabin to me has always had a psychedelic sense of harmony, I used to call him the Jimi Hendrix of romantic piano. What I love about him is his pantonal sense which is not atonal but frees harmony up. You can learn a lot from Arnold Schoenberg, especially the three pieces of his Opus 11. Also my composition teacher Dennis Sandole (Coltrane’s teacher also) has a great solo piano piece that was very influential on me called “Beresith”. It is on the Dennis Sandole Project album on Cadence Records. I also recall going through Vincent Persichetti and Schoenberg’s harmony book.

Abstract expressionism was also a big influence on my harmonic sense. Jackson Pollock’s intersection of fractured lines functioned for me as an abstract of what I talked about earlier with counterpoint that happens in nature that forms clusters of events and entities on its own. Mark Rothko emitted the pulsating colourfield that I generate in the bass register of the piano.

But on another level all of this is meaningless. The whole idea is to reach for something in your imagination. Sure, you need source material to start out. But your own ideas will soon surface and the notebooks you keep and develop your own ideas in are the gold and the goal. Harmonic instinct is a gift but it can take a great amount of work to unveil an original application.

Matthew Shipp’s The Intrinsic Nature Of Shipp is released by Mahakala Music. Subscribers to The Wire can read Peter Margasak’s album review via Exact Editions