A Juilliard graduate can just as easily benefit from it as the film composer or song arranger.Īnd the method, so much like its author, begins at the beginning and leaves nothing out there is nothing for the student to wonder about or be unsure of. It does not teach a musical “style.” What you learn here can be applied to a church hymn, to a heavy metal song, to the symphony orchestra, and to the music of the past and the present – to any of the genres we encounter in every day life. Indeed, as Spud says in his Preface to Book I, EIS is the exposition of a pure theory of music. However, the written text of the method continually reasserts the classical theoretical approach of objectivity and abstraction. Understandably it bears more than a little of the imprimatur of the music industry style of the day. Therefore his method relies heavily on examples by the author and by his numerous students. Since Spud had gained fame and fortune in the music industry, he wanted for his students the same or even greater success. The highly original approach is apparent from the very beginning, yet how many students have I taught who said, “Finally, we have a theory method we can use in real life, in our everyday circumstances.” This originality was not for the sake of the ego of the author, but for the benefit of his students! Spud was starting a new method of his own, a method remarkably unique. Interestingly, the method is still being revised and expanded to this day, and this will continue as long as Spud is alive to do so.

Each new page added to the text had to pass muster: every student had to be satisfied that there were no questions about the new page before it would be published into the final version. EIS began with a single page, but it expanded greatly and rapidly. He persisted and finally, after numerous refusals, was told by the new teacher to come back next week for his first lesson.įrom that point on Lyle Murphy, the teacher and creator of the Equal Interval System, began taking students – almost all of them from the jazz and entertainment industry. The veteran, however, was not to be deterred. He was very surprised when an even more surprised Spud Murphy told him he did not teach, and to find somebody else. This GI, just after the war ended, approached the famous Spud Murphy to ask him for music lessons. Murphy’s method may have never come about but for a World War II veteran. We will see evidences of the accidental, the serendipitous and the transcendent as we follow and observe Mr. Lyle Murphy’s music composition method, “Horizontal Composition, the Equal Interval System,” or EIS, in historical context. Lyle Murphy’s Horizontal Composition, the Equal Interval System: An Assessment

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