Thoughts On Instrumentation

It dawned on me the other day about the importance of instrumentation to the promotion of music. Many times the instrumentation that you select for a song--whether it be solo piano, orchestral, or pop--will make your listener decide immediately whether they want to continue to listen to your music. Here's what I mean...

If you're flipping through radio stations, catch a quick ad on TV, or even stumble across a user's MySpace page on the internet, the first thing that you'll hear when a piece of music starts playing is its instrumentation. Even before you hear lyrics, even before you hear a melody, even before you can figure out how fast a piece of music is, you'll immediately identify what's playing it. You may not know the specifics--is that an oboe or English horn? Nylon string guitar or finger-picked acoustic?--but you'll immediately get a rough sense of what's producing the sounds that you hear. And based on that snap judgment, chances are you'll immediately know what genre of music it is, and based on your existing biases, make a decision whether you'll want to keep listening or not.

In this day and age, most music is stumbled upon--that is, you casually came across it in an iPod commercial, or an episode of Grey's Anatomy, or even a video game. So what if the choices that you make in instrumentation are SO powerful, and SO compelling, that the moment someone hears the combination of instruments that you use, they're compelled to keep listening? That would be a powerful tool.

There's not a lot of music out there with instrumentation this compelling, however. If you work within a specific genre, a lot of times your instrumental choices will be made for you--acoustic instruments for country, electronic for electronica, beats for hip hop, orchestra for classical, etc. So to find stuff like this, one probably has to turn to more crossover artists. To give you a few examples, the first time I heard Bjork was a revelation. The way she would mix delicate timbres like a music box with heavy electronic beats in 'Pagan Poetry' was inspired:

I was not a huge Sting fan, but the first ever single I bought of his was his duet with Cheb Mami on the song 'Desert Rose', which I first heard in a Jaguar commercial. The mix of commercial production with Arabic vocals grabbed my attention, and I went and bought the track:

Peter Gabriel's 'Passion' soundtrack was a huge inspiration for me. Talk about fusing world music elements with synths... Peter Gabriel rewrote the rule book on this one.

My friends the On Ensemble do great work like this as well--fusing traditional Japanese music with hip hop and electronica:

And let's not forget all the excellent African music/pop fusion that's been done out there, by the likes of Paul Simon in Graceland and Hans Zimmer for The Lion King, perhaps the music that 'Baba Yetu' gets compared to most often. (Personally, while I love Hans' music and admire him as a composer, I don't think Baba Yetu and The Lion King are really all that similar. Most people make the comparison because it's the closest cultural reference they have to anything that's an African choral hybrid, but neither of us were the first to fuse African choral music with orchestral writing, and hopefully neither of us will be the last.)

More Composition Questions, Answered

Mark, a student at the Berklee College of Music, had this question for me recently:

I've come to a point where I realize that I've somehow lost my intuition for music. I just was wondering if you've ever experienced a time in your career where you've thought that you couldn't write music anymore, because you had to absorb too much knowledge and transcribed too much soundtracks?

How do you find a balance between writing from the soul and technique? I do very hard to find my balance. When I look back in the earlier days I did compose only from the soul, now somehow I do the complete opposite.

It's a bit of a tough question. I can't say there was ever a time in my career when I thought I couldn't write any more music, but there are definitely times when I feel like I'm on fire and everything I turn out is gold, and times when I'm frustrated and grinding my gears. Everyone you talk to in any sort of creative art will tell you this happens all the time, though, and the best thing you can do is just try to work through it.

The most important thing is to always just keep writing music. The worst thing that can happen is for you to fall into some sort of creative slump, where you're prevented from writing music by the mere fear that what you write is going to be bad. This is how creative careers go down in flames--when you find yourself so intellectually stifled by your own frustrations that you can't bring yourself to start creating.

I've always said that you have to write a lot of bad music, before you start writing good music. It's almost like you have to get the bad stuff out of your system. I think that your college days will be particularly confusing because you're bombarded with expectations from your teachers and peers, and pulled in many different creative directions. You don't really have a voice yet--you're too young, frankly. You won't have a voice until well into your thirties, forties, or later. Don't sweat it, it will come.

As to your second question, I think one should ALWAYS write from the soul. Technique is certainly very important, but it should never be viewed as a replacement for writing from the soul--nor should it be seen as being in competition. Rather, it's something that should supplement what you do. I almost always write exclusively from the soul, and then apply technique and craft to honing the details. The broad swaths of a composition are written instinctually--things like fine tuning counterpoint, orchestrations, voicings, etc. can happen later, when you can take your time to bring the full bearing of your training on the small details, without fear of losing the big picture.

However, if at the moment you're composing based solely on technique, don't worry about it--it's what you SHOULD be doing. You're in school. You SHOULD be absorbing as much technique as you can, and be crafting technique-based music for the purpose of internalizing all the techniques you're learning. Do it for as long as you can bear it, and don't worry if you feel like you're losing your instinct. You're NOT losing your instinct--it's just taking a back seat for the moment, while you absorb different techniques that will serve well as tools in the future. Eventually you'll rediscover your instinct, develop a confidence in your own style, and start writing instinctually again. And on that day, since you've already put in the hours learning all the techniques and crafts, you'll find that they're useful tools in your toolbox--tools that you can whip out as needed, or put away when you don't feel like using them. Or better yet, they'll have subconsciously worked their way into your instinct, and the music you write will be both soulful AND technically sound.

So don't worry for now. Everything will be okay in the end, I promise. Hope that helps?

Open Forum: Becoming A Composer Pt. 3

Here's the follow up to Danny K's follow question:

I forgot to ask about good harmonies/counterpoint though, so it'd be great if you could talk about that as well in the next post! Listening to Baba Yetu...

As for the harmony question, again, I think you really just have to listen to what you think is good music, and take note of what chord progressions that they use. My own music tends to keep it very simple (although I can get rather complex at times if necessary, like the instrumental buildup section in Baba Yetu when I start on a C-major and end on a C#-minor). The bulk of popular music uses just a handful of chords: I, V, IV, ii, vi, bVI, bVII, etc. (if you don't know what these letters mean, don't worry... unless you're planning on becoming a composer. In which case, if you don't know what these mean, you'd better do your homework.)

I would say, though, that for many composers, harmonic progression is not dictated separately from melody. The way I think is that I come up with melodies AND the harmonies behind them simultaneously. It's not like I say 'Here's a chord progression that I want to write a melody around.' I think it almost HAS to be done simultaneously because most of the time when you choose to write a certain note in a melody, it comes with a contextual harmonic implication as well--that is, it's a high note that wants to resolve, or wants to be stable, etc. After all, a note is given the bulk of its meaning based on the harmonic context it sits in.

I will say one thing, though; you can't write a melody that stays too comfortably within the principal notes of a chord (the one, three and five) without sounding banal and forgettable. I often move to suspended 4ths, 7ths, and 9ths, and then resolve back. Since you're a fan of Baba Yetu, give the main melody a listen and you'll see what I mean. Pay attention to when I land on notes that are part of the chord, and when I don't, both in terms of which bars they're in, and which beats on the bars. And then pay attention to the way I resolve them.

As for counterpoint, if you have any specific questions, please do ask!

Open Forum: Becoming A Composer Pt. 2

Here's Danny K's second question about composing:

Also, is it true that most modern composers, despite having a background in theory, have largely abandoned the idea of harmonic progressions and such similiar 'classical' concepts? That's what my friend (who got a full ride to Oberlin) told me, and I breathed a small sigh of relief. Should I be sitting here wondering what the chord progression in my given movement should be and what cadence I should end it with, or is it normal to just have a keyboard next to me as I compose and punch out chords to see what sounds best as I work?

Yes, it's true, but not quite in the way I think you're imagining.

Modern music in the 20th-century got very avant-garde; and the idea of any harmony at all was poo-poo'd upon as being very antiquated and dated. It was partially a response to the fact that music in the 19th-century had gotten so overly romantic, that 20th-century composers wanted to break as far away from that as possible. Here's an example that I randomly picked off YouTube:

All through the 20th-century, composers were often derided if they wrote music that was too harmonic, sentimental, or generally tuneful. However, while the classical establishment strayed from tonality, the popular establishment (and that includes composers working in film and musical theatre) stayed very tonal, and very romantic. And since public taste has always been for the tuneful, classical music saw its audience shrink to the point that even die-hard classical music fans had a hard time listening to the music of the day, and would prefer just to hear the same old 18th and 19th-century works.

So all of this is to say that, yes, it's perfectly acceptable to write music these days that doesn't follow conventional chord progressions--and in fact, that doesn't use chords at all. HOWEVER, that isn't to say that you shouldn't take the craft of chord progressions seriously. I think that if you're going to make up your mind and be a harmonic, tonal composer (and that's what almost every single film or video game composer is), you should make up your mind to do it well.

But that said, using your ear to determine what chord comes next is a perfectly valid way of coming up with chord progressions. Don't worry about classical issues of voice-leading and such. Just write what sounds good and natural to you.

I'll get to your other question about 'good harmonies/counterpoint' next. If you have any other questions, just ask!

Open Forum: Becoming A Composer Pt. 1

I recently got an email from a young, intrepid high schooler named Danny K., who asked me a few questions about pursuing an education and career in creating music. So rather than just respond to him via email, I asked him if he would mind if I answered his questions on my blog, just in case other people might find my answers informative or useful. I'll probably break up my response into two separate blog posts, so check back in a few days. So with that in mind, here we go:

I was wondering if you have any tips on composing, how to make memorable melodies, themes, orchestration, etc. just really awesome tips that I could utilize to make better sounding pieces...

The most important thing, I think, is to learn how to use your ears. Listen to as much music that you think is memorable, highly melodic, catchy, etc. and really pay attention to how they construct things. For example, what's the overall shape of the melody? Does it repeat? Where does it repeat? When it repeats, does anything change, or does it stay the same?

I was lucky in that I was born with a good ear. When I hear a piece of music, I can pretty much write down for you most everything that happens in that piece. And so in fact, when I hear music, what I'm actually doing is creating a mental transcription of it in my head. I think that's what helped me learn to write good melodies. Over the course of my lifetime, I've transcribed in my head thousands and thousands of melodies. And after you do that, you pretty much intuitively know what makes a good tune.

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*.

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.