As non-professional hobby musician, who is interested in Jazz,

I am currently looking into Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, (LCCOTO) by George Russell, which as many of you will already know had a inpiring impact on Modal Jazz.

According to my understanding it‘s especially useful for conceptualizing on a continuous metric-scale (ingoing to outgoing) the gravity towards the tonic a melodic improvisation or composition over is expected to have.

If I am not mistaken this metric-scale will be usefull to guide if a line is percieved more consonant or dissonant, from normal diatonic up to a 12-tone feeling.

If I get it right OM out of the box has not yet specialized functions for this concept. Am I right ?

Here‘s my simple idea:

Say we want in a jazz like approach a melodic line over a given C tonic (major) chord.

The C Lydian chromatic scale consists of following notes:

C, G D, A, E, B, Fs, Gs, Eb, Bb, F, Db.

Each note may be assigned with increasing gravity level on a metric-scale from 1 to 12.

When composing in OM we may utilize the mapping to allow for values limited to say 1-5 (C pentamajor) or 1-7 (C Lydian) or choose subsets of 1-12 which allow to have elements beyond level 7.

I would be very surprised if this idea has not yet been explored among the experts in this forum.

Thanks for your insights.

Cliff

I never explore this interesting concept but as a quick first idea, you can use gen-surround function to "navigate" into this pitch set as a kind of master harmonic track for a composition.

I will develop in next weeks a couple of functions which cover the concept (as far as I understand it and as far as I am capable in LISP).

First on my list is to have the functionality to query the fundamental Lydian Parent Scale for a given underlying chord.

Example: cmaj -> c lydian, amin -> c lydian (as well), g7 -> f lydian, dmin7 -> f lydian, fsmin7 -> a lydian.

This should be (theoretically) straight forward with PCS and a bit set operations.

Once I have something I will share it with musical examples.

I am still studying the book…

While reading I think a living list of ideas for functions which support LCCOTO would make sense

• find-parent-scale-for-chord: Find parent scale according to LCCOTO for a list of chords and a list of candidate scales, see post

• find-chord-for-parent-scale: Find chords in a parent scales, see post

• gen-lydian-chromatic-scale: tbd

• …

Good learning resource is the playlist on YT, by Bob Spellman: