you must hate my stuff then . . . LOL!
I compose polytonal and polyharmonic pieces and then work a melody into this chaotic soup using unequal tempered scales that move in & out of all the mayhem.

If it sounds good it sounds good, I just don't like the practice of "soloing" over stuff, half the music becomes an afterthought and it nearly always sounds crudely slapped together, plus most of the time people oversimplify everything to give the melody more leeway, effectively restricting themselves to gain more freedom. As a means of pure experimentation by all means go for it, but as a method of composing music I don't give it much credit.

I didn't understand a word of what y'all were saying. :laughing:

huh? it's the crux of all improvisation

stuff that is composed with all the rules that you speak of lack that spontaneity

of course, you have to adhere to certain rules, when improvising over a chord structure, but it's mostly free-form

and the "passing chords" you mentioned, feel more like sub-dominants to me, the anchoring chords are still the diatonics

Did ya'll go to a music school or did you teach yourself?

half-half

blues and rock are self-taught

i took jazz lessons, in improvisation and theory (never had a classical backing, though, i can only understand jazz theory)

it could be called a "turnaround" in blues, your ears will still focus on the diatonics

I'm 51 I've studied with loads of people including advanced theory and composition.

he was a sideman to R n B acts

although Howlin' Wolf wanted to hire him and he said (quote) - "you guys play the real thing" - meaning he wasn't really into "authentic" blues

I didn't say anything about following rules to compose music. There are far better ways of using spontaneity in your works, if you have the ear and you can play directly from what's in your head why not compose melody and harmony as one single unit? if you can't then you're fumbling blindly at a few scales to play within a safe boundary of an already set harmonic progression.

I did say they were secondary dominants, I was against the idea of calling them passing chords.

You're not taking into account the voice leading, dissecting a phrase into separate parts and explaining them as if they exist in a vacuum goes against the idea of music analysis, it's listened to as an organic whole so why shouldn't it be analysed as an organic whole? Every chord even the diatonic ones are deviations from the tonic, a vi in A major could just as likely be a iii in D major applying functions to them is useless without looking at their place within the phrase.