Life as Soundtrack
Robert hit it:
I’m writing the soundtrack of my life.
(Aren’t we all?)
Six Compositional Challenges
I’m a great believer in growth by challenge: taking on tasks that force you to reach beyond your personal comfort zones and clichés. With that in mind I give you the following six compositional challenges. Take them seriously and I guarantee they will nudge (perhaps even kick) you forward in your personal musical evolution.
Create a piece of free groove. A piece with great rhythmic vitality and interest, but whose rhythms do not adhere to a meter or BPM grid. Think: extraterrestrial IDM.
Create a piece for your own solo voice. Song, narration, mouth percussion, whatever. But no effects, no overdubbing, no accompaniment; just you, in all your vocal glory.
Create a piece with (at least) 50% silence. Regard the silence as a presence rather than an absence. Strive to make the piece breathe … rather than choke and gasp.
Create a piece that uses only sounds the likes of which you have never heard before.
Create a piece in your least favorite genre. Can’t stand hardcore? Write a piece of death metal. No fair trashing or satirizing; the goal is to compose something competent in a genre you despise.
Create a piece that no one (except you) will ever hear. Observe carefully how your composition process and results differ from pieces you write for an audience.
If you’re into it, please share your results (except, of course, for the last challenge). I’d love to hear what you come up with. :-)
Dubstep
I always liked dubstep (Burial, in particular) — which is FAR from the case for me for most electronica genres — but i only started really liking it recently. Of all popular electronic-music genres I’ve heard, it resonates most strongly on an emotional level for me. (Some ambient and drone stuff gets there too, but usually not as powerfully.)
It reminds me why i got into composing in the first place … to immerse myself in (beautiful mysterious) sound.
The Creative Force
We all have it.
Everyone/everything has it.
It’s just a question of removing the crap that gets in the way of it, right?
The Rhythmic Divide
I grew up loving the complex, jagged, unpulsed rhythms of the post-Webernian Euros: Stockhausen, Xenakis, Boulez, etc. They were, and continue to be, as — or often more — satisfying to me on a purely rhythmic level than pulsed/metered beats. Naively, I assumed that most progressive music fans also loved aperiodic rhythmic flows. Now, after ten years of making aperiodic electronica “free grooves” and running into an overwhelming LACK of interest/understanding among the people who’ve listened to them, I’m finally starting to believe in a kind of rhythmic divide:
You either get/like/love aperiodic rhythms, or you don’t.
Those who do can feel fully musically/rhythmically satisfied with a well-crafted aperiodic flow. Those who don’t probably wouldn’t even call such a flow “rhythmic,” rather: chaotic or random-sounding.
Which side of the rhythmic divide are you on? Does this speak to you? Or this periodicized variant? Or are you in the rarefied minority that can enjoy both (depending, of course, on context)?
Boundaries
Contemporary electronic music is plagued by near-universal adherence to boundaries and rules: the 4/4 dictum, standard half-dozen effects, groove fascism, dumbed-down melody and harmony, limited sonic palette, and so on. Trembling before rules stifles compositional chance-taking, which causes the dreaded “same old, same old” effect. It’s too rare these days to listen to a new track and think, “I’ve never heard anything like this before.”
That’s because e-musical creators have become too proper and boundary-kowtowing. Don’t fall into the well-behaved composer trap! You and your listeners deserve better. Cultivate, instead, a healthy disrespect for boundaries.
1. Identify your musical boundaries to know thine enemy.
2. Cozy up to your boundaries. Tease them, experiment with the place of great power that exists at the interface between what’s acceptable to you and what’s not.
3. Make forays into the taboo realm that’s just beyond your boundaries. See how it feels, what musical treasures it offers.
4. Dare to go deeper and deeper into this forbidden realm. Remain patient and open-eared; the further you go, the greater the treasures, but the harder they are to find. The ultimate goal is attaining a boundary-less approach to music.
Most boundaries don’t really exist anyway; they’re just conventions, like borders between countries, and limits of style and taste. Far more exciting is to think in terms of constant exploration of new, uncharted, unbounded territory.
spLinters
A dozen spLinters for your aural pleasure (und pain):
Groove Fascism
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” A great quote from a great man … but one that electronica composers seem to have taken all too narrowly. For the Duke, swing was not simply drums or the rhythm section. It was the way that beat, meter, tempo, melody, harmony, phrasing, and silence played off one another. Its power derived not from exact repetition or quantization, but from organic flow, musical breathing.
These days, downtown, grass-roots electronica is beset with “groove fascism.” It’s groove über alles, baby; a sorry state of e-musical affairs.
Abandoning groove is not the solution. Stepping out from under the yoke of groove fascism is. There are lots of ways to get started. Dare to thwart the ‘Thou shalt write in 4/4’ commandment by throwing in some odd meters, unexpected accents and missed or extra beats. Develop your melodic and harmonic skills and feature them in your pieces, instead of just using them as foils to the almighty groove. Push your beats beyond their (and your) comfortable borders by using unconventional percussion sounds, varying tempo, layering polymeters. Listen to Autechre, Murcof, Richard Devine, Venetian Snares, Twerk, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartok, Stockhausen.
Or, take the truly dangerous leap from the metronomic to the linguistic. Model your rhythmic flow after the subtle, non-quantized, and very expressive rhythms of spoken language. Zappa said it best: Make your music speak.
The Horror of Kumquat Pond
Just in time for the holidays, a trio of short pieces in loving tribute to the glory of grade-Z 50s sci-fi/horror soundtracks:
The Horror of Kumquat Pond
Knock knock …
Monsters from the Id!
Foreground: Endangered Species?
When taking in a sensory experience (listening to music, watching a movie, etc.), we tend to assign levels of importance to the various strands of sensory input. We relegate, consciously or not, some strands to the background, some (often one) to the foreground, and the rest to the middle. Contemporary electronic composers are adept with back- and middle grounds; this is where most groove-centric music lives. But most can’t — or don’t want to — produce inspired foreground material: layers that don’t just dovetail with the groove but stand out above it as a soaring melodic line stands out above a sequence of chords.
When music serves as an accompaniment to another medium (film, tv, dance, etc.), this other medium usually occupies the foreground. Dance music doesn’t have to worry about filling the foreground; the dancers take care of this. Likewise for tv and movie soundtracks. It’s in standalone pieces that one hungers for foreground. How many times have you heard an atmospheric piece and thought: “That would make a great soundtrack for a sci-fi movie.” If the piece had a strong foreground layer, you might not have thought of it as accompaniment, but as sufficient in itself.
The moral: If you write standalone music, you should consider investing your pieces with compelling foregrounds. If you don’t, you risk having listeners perceive them as non-self-sufficient soundtracks in search of a foreground movie to give them meaning.