(no subject)
As long as I can remember I've sounded out other people's songs on whatever instrument I happened to be obsessed with at the time. I've picked out classical melodies on recorder in grade school and clarinet in high school. I've pieced together 80's songs on my folks' electronic keyboard and plunked out pop songs on the baby grand they had for a few years. I've picked out countless bass lines, drum cadences, and even the occasional guitar part if it's simple enough for my pathetic 3 chord skills. Now that I've had a piano of my very own for about 8 months and can practice for however long I want (until my back and wrists hurt or the children look like they're considering cannibalism if I don't feed them), I've had a grand time trying out all kinds of new songs.
What I've recently noticed when I'm sounding out a new song or struggling with my pathetic chart reading skills ( I keep thinking I'll get better the longer I do it but I still suck after all this time) is that I get a charge out of seeing how the composer's brain is put together. Some of them, especially the heavy hitters like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart have very alien sets of logic. Makes me wonder how much is their own weird wiring that gave them the ability to have such enormous scope of the aural landscape and how much was training and cultural influence. Nature versus nurture is what I'm wondering about, I guess.
I was fumbling my way through "Moonlight Sonata" yesterday and it seemed like every little turn of phrase was so packed with emotional dialog, colored with intent I got a lump in my throat and my eyes went all hot. I never noticed all that heavy stuff in there before I played it (badly, I might add) myself even though I know the piece so well that if you were able to jack your headphones directly into my brain I could play it back mentally as well as any iPod. We're trained to have emotional responses to music by all the visual media we've soaked up over our lifetimes; think of all the movies you love and try to take the soundtrack out: it's impossible to pry the character of the music out of the rest of the cast, right? What kicks my ass is the idea that the big boys didn't have all that reinforcement. They didn't see a bunch of bad-asses striding away slow-mo from an exploding building or whatever dramatic thing filmmakers used music for italics. The powdered wig set had this emotional language down way before all that. The music they were writing had to be partly their own struggles with God and man, love and money, being sick and bad service from the hired help. I'll bet they also had those unexpected moments of "dude, that sounded so cool." It's not like people don't do that now. I think it's pretty hard to write good anything without having lived with the basic emotions behind the piece. It's just that we're all more on the same emotional page than perhaps people used to be. You might not see whatever odd associations there might be in people's minds, such as middle C as being masculine, a particular shade of Windows blue, and slightly smug (I'm pretty sure that's just me. Don't even get me started on the personalities populating the English alphabet.) but almost all of us identify the emotions connected to "Adagio for Strings" as opposed to "Walking on Sunshine" .
All the different songs I've been learning I've been able to see a small hint of how the songwriter's internal logic works. Somebody like Yoko Kanno who writes drastically different sounding bits for anime sountracks for has a stunning array of tricks. She's able to build castles on the foundation of a single key or a certain style. Seems like Joe Hisaishi has this one theme he's been trying to perfect over his whole career. I love seeing inside their minds, what made them choose the run that kind of "doesn't go" with everything else, the way they resolve discordance, how they decide if rhythm or melody is going to win, how some of them can't resist those jarring fifths (yes, Mr. Copland, I'm looking at you), how others have a sweet tooth for big round major chords even though they try to go all Adkins on us with bitter minors, you know it's only a matter of time before they crash through the front window of Kristy Creme and dive head first into the glaze.
I'd always considered the thorough knowledge of scales and other boring backwaters of music theory to be useless impediments, a sort of professional hazing to deter the insincere from making music. I know lots of people who learned scales who insist they can't play anything. However, I'm starting to wonder now that if I knew all the different sorts of scales and basic ideas behind chord structure, I might understand the underlying themes better. On the other hand I wonder if it would make me incapable of enjoying the stuff I do now, which is to meditate upon what the composer was really thinking when they tapped into wherever creativity comes from. Whenever I learn something new, like the bass line for Chemical Wire, I deeply enjoy pretending to step into Mike Watt's boots. When I learned all those dull-as-toast minuets, I was spiritually powdered, corseted, had cleavage muffins up to my chin. And now that I'm working on the 10 page Cowboy Bebop solo (8 down, two to go), not only am I a bizarrely gifted little Japanese woman, but also a jazz whistling space cowboy. I'd hate to trade all that for knowing "oh, yeah, another B-flat minor scale pentatonic wank-fest." (Yes, I just made that up and have no idea what I'm talking about.)
Too long; didn't read version: "Oh, humanity, how I love thee. And also, music is cool."
What I've recently noticed when I'm sounding out a new song or struggling with my pathetic chart reading skills ( I keep thinking I'll get better the longer I do it but I still suck after all this time) is that I get a charge out of seeing how the composer's brain is put together. Some of them, especially the heavy hitters like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart have very alien sets of logic. Makes me wonder how much is their own weird wiring that gave them the ability to have such enormous scope of the aural landscape and how much was training and cultural influence. Nature versus nurture is what I'm wondering about, I guess.
I was fumbling my way through "Moonlight Sonata" yesterday and it seemed like every little turn of phrase was so packed with emotional dialog, colored with intent I got a lump in my throat and my eyes went all hot. I never noticed all that heavy stuff in there before I played it (badly, I might add) myself even though I know the piece so well that if you were able to jack your headphones directly into my brain I could play it back mentally as well as any iPod. We're trained to have emotional responses to music by all the visual media we've soaked up over our lifetimes; think of all the movies you love and try to take the soundtrack out: it's impossible to pry the character of the music out of the rest of the cast, right? What kicks my ass is the idea that the big boys didn't have all that reinforcement. They didn't see a bunch of bad-asses striding away slow-mo from an exploding building or whatever dramatic thing filmmakers used music for italics. The powdered wig set had this emotional language down way before all that. The music they were writing had to be partly their own struggles with God and man, love and money, being sick and bad service from the hired help. I'll bet they also had those unexpected moments of "dude, that sounded so cool." It's not like people don't do that now. I think it's pretty hard to write good anything without having lived with the basic emotions behind the piece. It's just that we're all more on the same emotional page than perhaps people used to be. You might not see whatever odd associations there might be in people's minds, such as middle C as being masculine, a particular shade of Windows blue, and slightly smug (I'm pretty sure that's just me. Don't even get me started on the personalities populating the English alphabet.) but almost all of us identify the emotions connected to "Adagio for Strings" as opposed to "Walking on Sunshine" .
All the different songs I've been learning I've been able to see a small hint of how the songwriter's internal logic works. Somebody like Yoko Kanno who writes drastically different sounding bits for anime sountracks for has a stunning array of tricks. She's able to build castles on the foundation of a single key or a certain style. Seems like Joe Hisaishi has this one theme he's been trying to perfect over his whole career. I love seeing inside their minds, what made them choose the run that kind of "doesn't go" with everything else, the way they resolve discordance, how they decide if rhythm or melody is going to win, how some of them can't resist those jarring fifths (yes, Mr. Copland, I'm looking at you), how others have a sweet tooth for big round major chords even though they try to go all Adkins on us with bitter minors, you know it's only a matter of time before they crash through the front window of Kristy Creme and dive head first into the glaze.
I'd always considered the thorough knowledge of scales and other boring backwaters of music theory to be useless impediments, a sort of professional hazing to deter the insincere from making music. I know lots of people who learned scales who insist they can't play anything. However, I'm starting to wonder now that if I knew all the different sorts of scales and basic ideas behind chord structure, I might understand the underlying themes better. On the other hand I wonder if it would make me incapable of enjoying the stuff I do now, which is to meditate upon what the composer was really thinking when they tapped into wherever creativity comes from. Whenever I learn something new, like the bass line for Chemical Wire, I deeply enjoy pretending to step into Mike Watt's boots. When I learned all those dull-as-toast minuets, I was spiritually powdered, corseted, had cleavage muffins up to my chin. And now that I'm working on the 10 page Cowboy Bebop solo (8 down, two to go), not only am I a bizarrely gifted little Japanese woman, but also a jazz whistling space cowboy. I'd hate to trade all that for knowing "oh, yeah, another B-flat minor scale pentatonic wank-fest." (Yes, I just made that up and have no idea what I'm talking about.)
Too long; didn't read version: "Oh, humanity, how I love thee. And also, music is cool."