Writing Music In My Sleep

Sometimes I actually write music in my sleep. The most common scenario is that I'll be doing something random in my dream, like walking on my old college campus. And in my dream I'll be listening to my Discman (this was the mid-nineties)...and on the Discman will be playing a new piece of music that I've never heard before.

Sometimes, if it's simple enough, I'll wake up and actually *remember* what I heard in my dream. Most of the time, that doesn't happen...especially if it's a complicated piece. In one dream, I went to the Disney Concert Hall and listened to the LA Philharmonic perform a very complicated symphonic work for a good five minutes. I woke up, and couldn't remember a damn thing about the piece.

Last night, instead of writing music passively in my dream (that is, by dreaming that I was hearing new music), I actually dreamt of sitting down and writing it. It was sophomore year in high school (which would correspond to the approximate age I started composing). My friends and I were riding our bikes in circles around my front lawn, when one them stopped and told me that he was taking a class on commercial production. His homework assignment was to create an ad for a beer company, and so he asked me if I could write the music for his ad. I said, "Sure, let me think up some ideas," and went inside, and sat down at my old out-of-tune upright piano. I then banged out a Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque Southern Rock tune, complete with lyrics:

"Where you gonna go, Jimmy...
Where you gonna go..."

Okay, well, the lyrics aren't exactly brilliant...but hey, it's not like dreams are supposed to make *sense*.

Drums...Lots And Lots Of Drums

An update on the album!

I spent three days at Sage And Sound Recording Studios in Hollywood with an arsenal of percussion. 8 of the 12 songs on Calling All Dawns require percussion of some sort, ranging from African ashikos and udus, Brazilian surdos, Middle Eastern dumbeks and frame drums, Japanese taiko...in other words, the works.

The bulk of the percussion was played by Greg Ellis; session musician (check him out on this summer's blockbuster Iron Man), drummer for Juno Reactor, former founder of Vas, and all around talented guy. We spent two and a half days laying down all manner of raucous noise.

Day three, the neo-taiko group On Ensemble came in to record the Japanese percussion, as well as to add some low-frequency bottom end for the entire album. Shoji Kameda, Kris Bergstrom and Maz Baba came in and played well into the night. Shoji, Kris and I go way back, actually; we all attended Stanford together, and played in Stanford Taiko as undergrads (those two were a helluva lot better at it than I was!).

In addition to their guest appearance on my album, they've got a great sophomore album in the works right now. Keep an eye out for it!

The session was engineered by the incomparable John Kurlander, of course. My album's in good hands with him.

Art Center's Graduate Showcase

We went to the Art Center College of Design's year-end graduate showcase last Friday night: me, my actress friend Jessica Quinn Donaghy, and my graphic designer girlfriend, who was an alum of the school (and former valedictorian, I might add). We spent three hours browsing through the portfolios of Art Center's graduate students--various disciplines on show included graphic design, motion graphics, transportation design, product design, environmental design, and many others.

I was most impressed by the environmental design work. This may be because my own particular design fetish has to do with furniture and interior design, but really, some of the work on hand was pretty phenomenal. One grad had an underwater theme to her work: lamps made up to look like jellyfish were suspended from the ceiling and attached to the wall.

The transportation design students were clearly very skilled, but after awhile I got tired of seeing The Car Of The Future everywhere I went. Perhaps if I understood the nuances of what made good trans-design, I would have a better appreciation for what I was looking at. Instead, it all looked like a bunch of car junkies wet dreams.

The product design room had some interesting work. This one in particular caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

It's an electric slide bass. There's a handle on the top of the neck with a clamp that presses against the strings. The bassist slides his or her hands back and forth to modulate the pitch. An interesting concept, except that it's completely counter-intuitive for any bassist to put his hand on the *top* of the neck. All bassists move around the neck with their left hand on the bottom--sort of akin to the motion of pumping a shotgun. Add to that the fact that if you have your hand above the neck, and slide the clamp all the way to the high register, you put your wrist in an extremely awkward, potentially painful position.

What ever happened to form follows function?

Music To Be Played vs. Music To Be Heard

Over the past 100 years or so, there has been a gradual migration in the way that music is conceived by its creators. 100 years ago, before the invention of recording technology, there was only one way that music could be heard; you had to be in the presence of a musician, who actually *played* the music for you. Now, if you want to hear music, all you have to do is press a button or two on your CD player/iPod/car radio/computer.

This is a fairly obvious statement, but it has implications, both good and bad, on how music is written. 100 years ago, as a composer, you had to take into consideration the performer of the music: you had to write something that could be played reasonably well by any musician. You had to take into consideration the limitations of both the players, and the spaces that they were playing in. And what's most important, since the act of listening involved being in the presence of a performer, you had to give them something to *perform*--and by that, I mean that you had to write in a manner that gave the instrumentalist something to show off their skills.

Let me elaborate first by establishing a principal that is dear to me (and I will put it in bold, so the point is not lost):

Very, very simple music can be very, very good music.

What I mean by this, is that it's not necessarily about how many notes you cram on a page, or how technically groundbreaking or virtuosic your composition is; quality is not necessarily dictated by complexity.

But when you write specifically for a performer (whether a specific performer, or instrumentalists in general), you really want to give the performer something to show off. So in other words, even though a piece of music might be made of ridiculously simple and technically mundane gestures (and still be a quality piece of music), your performer will be lacking something because they're still going to want to show off how quickly and brilliantly they can play fast figures and scales. And frankly, 100 years ago, performers had considerably more sway over the composers writing for them, because if it weren't for them, no one would hear their works.

I recently attended a chamber music concert at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School, by the Calder Quartet, of the Mendelssohn String Quartet in A minor (op. 13) "Is Est Wahr?" It was a gorgeously written piece....a lot of stretto entrances, fugal writing....moving parts, so to speak. And no doubt it was a showcase for the technical proficiency of the players too (and let's face it...of the composer, as well). It was a great reminder of the way music used to be written, in the days before recording technology.

On to what has changed in the last 100 years: because of recordings, now music can be heard without the aid of the live performer. This gives rise to a new methodology of thinking of writing music; that is, now you think about the recorded process first, then think about how to perform it live later on. This is how virtually 99.9% of popular music is conceived these days; in recorded form first, live form second. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. On one hand, it's liberating to the pure musical process of composing; that is, your palette is suddenly limitless, and you can make your music as complex--or as simple--as you want it to be. But on the other hand, it's easy to lose sight of the factors that make live music great, and to short change the performers that may ultimately be playing your material.

What winds up happening is that a lot of the music being written for popular outlets these days is frankly well below the technical abilities of those people performing it...especially in orchestras. You see this in the recording studio a lot--orchestras come in to do film scoring sessions, and are bored silly by the simplicity of the music that they're playing. I'm sympathetic to that--but at the same time, because something is simple, does it necessarily make it less of a piece of music? I don't think so.

Those are my rambling thoughts for the day.

The Record Industry's 20 Greatest Screwups

For some reason I take perverse pleasure in reading disaster stories about the record industry. It's not that I have any sort of deep-seated hatred towards them; it's more about taking comfort that mistakes get made up to the highest levels of the industry, and if I wind up making a few of my own, it's still comforting to know that I'm not the guy at Decca who passed on the Beatles. (The #2 all-time worst mistake.)

Anyway, read the whole Blender article here.

Baba Yetu....The Role Playing Game?

One of the great joys of having written something that people connect with, is that you get to see all the creative works that your own work has inspired. Over the two years since the release of Civilization IV, I've been sent all sorts of writing, music, and videos from fans who found something in my music that sparked their creativity....and I love seeing that! But perhaps the most unique derivative work that I've seen thus far is the Baba Yetu Role Playing Game.

Apparently it's about lions. You create a lion character, then you wander around the prides, hunting, challenging other lions for territory, and occasionally mating (I'm really curious how they plan to make that work). Unfortunately, I think the game's creators have given up on trying to develop it....I think they may have gotten a dose of reality, and realized that creating and maintaining an online world is not the easiest thing to do. But still, I have to give them credit for trying.

A Recommendation: Keren Ann

It’s been awhile since I’ve stumbled across something new and worthwhile, but this singer’s got me good. And the thing is, she’s really not all that new….I’ve just been in a cave, apparently.

Keren Ann is an Israeli-born, Paris-based singer/songwriter. She writes, among other things, acoustic guitar ballads: but not the clichéd whiny-coffee-shop-emo variety. She writes GOOD SONGS. This is the one that caught my attention…it’s called “I’m Not Going Anywhere”:

Here’s another one….check out the Lou Reed-inspired semi-spoken vocals (the classical term for this is singspiel…forgive me, but I’m in Professor Tin mode these days…):

“Lay Your Head Down” makes me feel like I’m listening to the Velvet Underground, and I don’t mean that in a derivative way; I mean that she’s very economical with all her musical gestures, which is something that I admire in musicians, and practice in my own writing. She gets straight to the point—no fussy intros, no long lead-ins. I believe strongly in that.

Here’s one more, called “Chelsea Burns.” just because I like to do things in threes:

UPDATE: It’s Tuesday evening, and I’ve been listening to “Not Going Anywhere” on repeat for the last 72 hours. That song has hit me in a soft spot. The chord changes, the phrase lengths, the performance…..I just love it!