- Author
- Roelant Hollander
- Published
- 22 January 2016
- Kind
- Personal blog post
- Original
- roelsworld.eu/blog-saxophone/coltrane-tone-circle/
- Subject
- Consonance and tuning
- Themes
- Rules that generate
What it is
Roelant Hollander examines a tone circle attributed to John Coltrane and given to Yusef Lateef. The post traces its history and collects interpretations. The blog itself describes its approach as philosophical and semiscientific.
What it says
- The drawing shows relationships among the twelve pitch classes as a circle.
- Its outer ring holds a whole-tone scale, the post explains.
- It relates sections of the circle to Giant Steps through a hexagram.
- Corey Mwamba offers another reading of the circled tones, as a compound scale.
- Stephon Alexander's book relays Sean Wayland's link to the all-interval tetrachord.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is the drawing, Coltrane's scores, remarks relayed from Lateef's circle and other readings. The post reports online speculation that someone else may have added the numbers. Geometric readings show what can be found in the drawing, not what Coltrane intended.
Interests and limits
The post moves between analysis and esoteric symbolism, such as pentagram and hexagram meanings. Much of its history is second-hand. This page draws on the post's main sections, not on all of its figures.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators. Overmyer asks which rules belonged to a tradition and which came afterward from its explainers. Hollander collects many readings of one Coltrane drawing. The same question applies: which of this geometry was Coltrane's?
- Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's editors build a grand Plan from a note that proves a laundry list. Hollander collects many readings of one Coltrane drawing. They show how much meaning a pattern can carry once people want it.