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A performing arts professional

Binrui Mo

Concert Director, Producer, Production Technologist, Violinist, and Public Engagement Innovator

Project2 Jazz Chant Harmonization :

Before we see this product, you might be interested what is Jazz Chant Harmonization. Well, I used Franz Tack's Gregorian Chant as a source to start my project 2. This chant could give you some stools and standers of translating the chant into modern form.

Here is my original chant:

It looks totally different from a modern music. It only has 4 lines. I will show you more:

This is the first time that I worked on my chant, the first thing is to translate it into modern music formate.

Here is my second translate production:

Here is my final production:

The sounds of the final production

Comments:

1.How did I harmonization change the way that I perceived the chant melody?

Once I kind of finished my product, it just sounds uncomfortable since the melody almost only has 2-3 notes. It is hard to harmonize it. After fixing some notes, it started to be better. Especially for the last two lines, which are my favorite lines since it hears like a half jazz music.

2. What difficulties did you face when creating your chant harmonization, and how did you overcome them?

I actually met a lot of hard stuff that stopped me for some reason. For example, once I got the main melody, which is a thing that always forces me to get the harmonization ASAP. However, since the melody only has two to three notes and it repeats and repeats again, I was also suffering. Then, I tried to think that the main melody is not a melody, it could be an accompaniment, and only using 3 notes of seventh chords. It was much faster to create the harmonization. Also, think of the "GT", which is useful too.

3. What do you like most about your chant harmonization, and is there anything that you would like to have done better?

Well, I love my chant's last two lines, especially for last two chords of the third line. Since this is my first time to do a Jazz chant, I think I did my best, but it could have been better at chords. Some of those chords are not "sounds good
" I really tried to find different chords to meet the repeating notes since I don't want to use one chord play the whole thing. Oh, one more thing that I really like to talk is, when your melody is boring, you could try changing the rhythms of each measure, that would help the melody to be more interesting.

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