David Stern's 12-Tone Patterns

Here's one of those 10-page PDFs that will take you several lifetimes to explore, David Stern's "12-Tone Patterns". Being a Dropbox link, I recommend downloading it in case it disappears.

I haven't been able to learn much about the author, which I feel bad about because this document breaks things down in a really nice way. It's clearly influenced by Slonimsky's approach but it isn't the same. (UPDATE: It did disappear, and I no longer have a copy, but I did manage to find out a bit about the author: Stern has a book out now called Intervallic Patterns for Improvisation. I don't know what's in the book but my guess is it makes the old PDF obsolete.)

In the suggested reading at the end, he mentions one of my favourite sourcebooks for practicing: Yusef Lateef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Here is a post about Lateef from Casa Valdez (where I learned of Stern's doc), with a great bit of jazz history and some references to chase up.

Of these, I'm planning to investigate Guy Lacour's etudes books; one is based on Messiaen's "modes of limited transposition" (which we call symmetrical scales). The other two volumes (50 studies each) seem not to state which scales they use. I might use them as sight-reading exercises and see what I discover.