Tag: Ludwig van Beethoven

Strange but true: As far as your body is concerned, all great music is the equivalent of a horror film.

“Takes my breath way,” “held me spellbound,” “gave me goosebumps”—these are the physical reactions we crave in music.

These reactions are also literally our physiological fear responses.

How does music transform our fears into pleasure?

Let me explain . . .

What is Musical “Sleight of Hand”?

It has to do with one of the Four Elements of Musical Magic: “Sleight of Hand.”

“Sleight of Hand” has to do with “music in time” (as opposed to “World Building”—the abstract “sound” of a passage or piece).

This means that “Sleight of Hand” is roughly equivalent to musical form. But it’s more than that.

Often when people talk form, they think of textbook “Forms”: Sonata form. Binary form. Ternary form. Rondo form. Song form. etc.  Or perhaps they describe it using letters to represent repetitions: AABA, ABAC, etc.

Meanwhile, the really ambitious incorporate tonal centers or draw Schenkerian diagrams.

All of these ways of thinking about form are useful, but they can miss the mark. Too often, they reduce form to a question of matching models or filling in boxes.

They can fail to ask questions like, “Why are we filling in boxes in the first place?”

“Sleight of Hand” has an answer for that, and it comes from the field of music cognition.

How Does Music Cognition Research Explain and Expand the Definition?

More than simply another name for form, “Sleight of Hand” is the art of misdirection.

It’s how we, as musical magicians, focus our audience’s attention one way so that we can surprise and delight them with what they’re not seeing we’re meanwhile doing the other way.

Repetition is the great “misdirection” that allows us to create tension and surprise.

According to scholar David Huron, surprise and tension play on our general psychology of expectation—the same psychology which induces flight, fight, and freeze responses to fear.

The physical reactions we crave in music (“takes my breath way,” “held me motionless,” “gave me goosebumps,” etc.) are ironically our bodies’ fear responses. Whether its music (good) or a physical threat (bad), this is how our bodies respond to uncertainty.

Likewise, though the familiar can feel boring, it also feels psychologically safe and reassuring.

The Takeaway

Here’s what this all means for us as composers: If you cannot carefully manage your repetitions, any tension you try to build will end up flaccid and any surprises you try create will come out underwhelming.

This, then, is the meaning of musical “Sleight of Hand”: creating the repetitions that allow for compelling tension and powerful surprises.

Last night, my mind was slightly blown while listening to Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata.

The piece plainly exhibited example after example of the World Building and Sleight of Hand magic I teach in the Wizarding School. It was a masterclass in how to obtain musical excellence.

And here’s the best part . . .

Beethoven’s music wasn’t saying, “This level of achievement is only for ‘geniuses.’ Ordinary folk like you need not try.”

Quite the opposite.

It was saying, “Here are all my secrets! Please, have them! They’re yours for the taking—if you want them.”

Whether you just started composing during the pandemic . . . or you’ve been composing for decades, the fastest way to make your music more vivid and richly nuanced is score study.

Score study makes theory and musicianship skills concrete for those still starting out. It helps you see that theory is *not* a formula for how music works, but simply a vocabulary to describe what you hear with precision.

It further helps you see that these “what” and “when” labels are not an end in themselves, but the springboard for the far more revealing “why” and “how” questions.

As those skills become increasingly intuitive and invisible, score study remains eye-opening and enlightening.

It becomes a dialogue with other musicians. You begin to paraphrase and read between the lines of what they wrote or played. What you compose becomes a response to that insight.

Thomas Adès reflects this idea when he says, “You have to think of the great composers as your friends. They might be frightening friends, but still friends anyway.”

That’s why, even though I have a PhD from a top-tier university, I still watch scores on YouTube every day. Because, like getting married, receiving a music degree is just a waypoint, not a final destination.

So, whether you have many music degrees or none at all, how do you make score study a part of your routine?