Stella by starlight
Ned Washington - Victor Young
© Copyright 1946 by Famous Music Corporation, New York
The analysis and study of a jazz song always has certain objectives. The 20th century produced a large number of songs, from jazz to blues to rock, that have become standards for musicians.
With the term standard we want to identify those songs that belong to a certain musical school of thought. They belong to a very specific category, like jazz, whose songs have made history in modern harmonic composition,
songs that you can find in the various publications of the Real Book.
Stella by starlight is surely one of the most well known and played standards, on which we will perform a complete harmonic and melodic analysis. The song develops in a series of chorus', using the most common rules of standard jazz.
Every chorus is made of a series of 32 bars and divided into 4 sections. Lets look at the harmonic development of the song.
Looking at the structure of the song we can define three main sections, which are the bars from 1 to 16, from 17 to 24 and finally the bars from 25 to 32.
The sections of a song are usually labelled with the letters A , B , C etc, depending on the case. The first chorus determines the carrying theme of the song, which is the melodic line, while the others are for the development of the solos. Seeing that the melodic line (the theme, in which you can listen to the base midi) is available in the Real Book and other publications, we will analyze the various sections of the score, and dividing the bars in order to have a series of chords to work on. This analysis starts on the next page.
We first need to work on the solo, which you can also see in the complete score. For this reason, its advisable to have good knowledge of theory and harmoics when studying a song.
Remember to use the harmonic base to study and to improvise. There is also a slower version of this base.
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