“[…] There are many ways, indeed an undetermined number of ways, of achieving a particular musical surface, a score. In general, in the academy, we have come round to teaching the composition of tonal music as a matter that begins with an abstraction — i.e. a harmonic progression or, more fashionably, a tonal structure that is prolonged and given detail through processes that can be loosely grouped together under the term diminution — rather than the assembly of concrete bits of musical material. Of course, this has never been the case in the teaching of vernacular musics, Jazz in particular, where training is closely associated with the acquisition of an ever-larger personal catalogue of possible chords, scales, and riffs, and there have been a number of heterodox theoretical projects: David Cope’s experiments, for example, have coalesced into a study of how bodies of musical surface “signatures” can be recombined to replicate compositions in the style of a given work, composer, or repertoire. One is struck, however, by one contrast in these two styles of theory instruction and that is the degree of intimacy between the theory-making and a particular body of music. […]„