A musical idea is not just something you visualize in your brain or even something you hear in your mind’s ear. It is both those things and more.
It is most of all something you feel in your GUT.
It is as instinctive and as personal and as urgent as the words you speak.
Sometimes you cannot immediately articulate that gut-level feeling, but it is nonetheless real, viscerally TRUE — waiting for you to give it its fullest expression, whether in words or in music.
For this reason, questions about “clichés” and “originality” and “groundbreaking-ness” are utterly beside the point.
When you speak your musical truth from your heart, what else matters?
The last few days I’ve been consolidating a general artistic statement for myself. (Perhaps one day I’ll post it. Perhaps not.) One of the things I realized while going through the exercise was that defining my musical interests flowed more naturally from describing my compositional process than from cataloging my materials. Not that the latter wasn’t doable, but I found the former to create a much more accurate picture of what I compose and why. (Artist friends: have you noticed this in your work?)
I was partially surprised by how surprised I was by this realization. I’d taken Intro to English Language. I’m aware of the hypothesis that how we talk about things shapes what we talk about. Yet up until this point, I had never thought of compositional process as having such a strong effect on compositional thought. But I suppose as Admiral Kirk said, “Well, now you have something new to think about.”
So how do I compose and what effect does that have on my music? I start by imagining the sounds of the instruments and the ways the can combine. This gives my music a strong focus on texture and sonority. Because the next step involves finding melodic embodiments of these ideas, from there my music tends to proceed along traditional, rhetorical terms. Still, because the emphasis is on texture, harmony for me becomes more of an organizing factor than a generative one.
To take a series of tangents that will return to the point: Harmony. So often I hear composers (especially my friends in the RB) talk about harmony as chord-chord-chord. I don’t subscribe to this interpretation because I was persuaded otherwise, first by Ernst Toch (I’ve linked to chapter 2 in his book, but chapter 1 is worth reading also), who describes it using the Heraclitian idea “Everything is in flux.”
Is harmony like a series of parade floats? I don’t think so. (Source: flickr.com/photos/pauljill/)
My second main influence is two sentences from Alfred Mann’s The Great Composer as Teacher and Student: “For a long time, ‘harmony’ continued to be the word used to describe a fabric of independent part-writing. It was not until the publication of Jean Philippe Rameau’s Traité d’haramonie in 1722 that the modern meaning was introduced.” This quote may be brief, but in combination with Toch, it profoundly changed me. I no longer think of harmony as isolated floats in a parade of “vertical simultaneities” (as Murray Boren would have put it), but rather as a cohesive stream with an overall sonority (and often direction). For instance, I hear most of Berio’s “O King” as a single “harmony” even if the vertical simultaneities change.
These reflections in turn remind me of a Morton Feldman quote I found just the other day: “For any music’s future, you don’t go to the devices, you don’t go to the procedures, you go to the attitude. And you do not find your own attitude; that’s what you inherit. I’m not my own man. I’m a compilation of all the important people in my life. I once had a seven-hour conversation with Boulez; unknown to him, it affected my life. I admire his attitude. Varèse’s attitude. Wolpe’s attitude. Cage’s attitude. I spent one afternoon with Beckett; it will be with me forever. Not his work; not his commitment; not his marvelous face, but his attitude.”
I tend to write more traditional music than any of my teachers at BYU, but my music has been informed—and, I would say, has been greatly enriched—by the (mainly) modernist attitudes I received from their teaching, which they passed on to me from composers such as Feldman, Cage, Xenakis, and Stockhausen. These attitudes are largely the reason that I start by thinking about sound. I don’t think I personally could achieve the music I do if my musical process began with melody and motive. And I really like the music I write, so I’m glad, even proud, to be a part of this tradition, even if my connection to it isn’t immediately obvious from the sound of my music.
Today I wrote music . . . while listening to other music. Though a first for me, this isn’t too unusual. One of my friends routinely writes music at concerts; my teacher admitted to writing one of his best pieces will at a friend’s recital; and I’ve even heard rumors that Luciano Berio wrote his Folk Songs while watching TV.
Gonzo and Fozzie demonstrate their skills at patting their heads and rubbing their stomachs in the dark room scene of The Great Muppet Caper.
Yet up until now, the idea of writing while listening to something else seemed weird to me, like simultaneously patting your head and rubbing your stomach. How could you write music and listen to different music at the same time? Writers certainly can’t do it. Imagine trying to write an essay while simultaneously reading Dickens. Though artists look at external objects all the time while they’re painting and drawing, they usually look at their subject, not, say, at a Jackson Pollack while painting a landscape. Why then does composition allow this unique multitasking?
I think it has something to do with the way our minds process music. Everyone is familiar with what it’s like to get songs stuck in their head. To non-musicians, it seems natural that composing an extension of this process. Composers simply listen to the music inside their heads and write it down. While many composers do say they write that way, if taking dictation from their earworms were all they were doing, it would seem to be as difficult for a composer to write music while listening to it as it would be for a writer to write while reading.
Instead, as I was composing today, I noticed that I was using multiple facilities. With one part of my brain and with my body I was processing the music I was listening to, and with another part of my brain, I was composing. The part that was composing wasn’t imagining sounds aurally but by feel. It was paying attention to what the harmonic and rhythmic relationships felt like rather than what they sounded like. After this experience, I happened to run into my aforementioned friend who confirmed that he experienced simultaneous listening and writing the same way.
What does this all mean? I’m not quite sure yet, only that composing is now more mysterious tonight than it was when I woke up this morning.
