Blind Alley

When my cello is making funny noises, I like to remind myself of the adage, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.” On the other hand, when I finally got around to getting my bow rehaired, the squeaky noises stopped. Sometimes it is the tools.

I’ve been contemplating, in a vague, fuzzy sort of way, the possibility of composing some synthesizer music in a more open-ended, less pop-based style. Music that’s shaped more like clouds, or flowers, or the stones in the bed of a mountain stream. My usual impulses, the unconscious promptings that produce bass lines, chord progressions, and alternating verse/chorus/bridge structures, seem to be leading me down a blind alley.

At this point, I confront the stark fact that sequencer software is designed for composing and recording pop music. Whether we’re talking about Cubase, FL Studio, Reason, Live, or some other program, it’s the same deal. These programs make some basic assumptions about your music that, while valid for 99.9% of the folks who use them, are quite limiting should you want to go off in a different direction.

One big assumption is that your music will be

Lingua Franca

So you’re describing the human species to a xenosociologist named Erbq, who comes from a planet somewhere near Aldebaran. You tell him (actually, Erbq is a him/2, but let’s not get into that) that we humans use tools and communicate using spoken words, which signify objects, actions, and relations. Also, we have a glandular system that releases chemicals into the bloodstream to stimulate quick action — emotions, in other words.

From this data, Erbq might reasonably conclude that humans will express their emotions by making sculpture and paintings. (I suppose we’d better tell him we have color-sensitive eyes too. That’s important information.) He might also be able to predict that in order to depict our social relations, we will tell stories, write poetry, and enact dramas, either onstage or in a film/video medium of some sort. All of this seems pretty natural, given the raw material of the human organism.

But would Erbq be able to predict the existence of music?

Music is a very odd art form. It’s almost entirely abstract, and yet it communicates. Music is a language whose words and sentences are, technically, meaningless. But somehow, the listener

Mood Swings

I could never do an album of ambient or new age music. Often I start a new piece with a quiet, reflective, dreamy intro … and then about two minutes later the drums and bass come piling in. I like contrast, and I like developing my material.

It all goes back to Beethoven, ultimately. In a single movement of a symphony he could move from phrases of delicate beauty to phrases of shattering power. I’m certainly no Beethoven — but why should I limit myself to anything less?

Cement Mixer

Being thoroughly enthusiastic about Propellerhead Reason (I just reviewed version 5.0 for an upcoming issue of Keyboard), I fell to wondering … if I were to record a bunch of music with Reason, what would I do with it? Are there people around who are uploading Reason tracks? Is there, like, a community of Reason users where I could hang out?

So I hopped over to the Propellerhead user forum and checked out some tunes in the Music section. Two hours later, I’m ready to throw up. Honestly. What a bunch of garbage!

The problem, I think, is that nobody is teaching these guys how to write music. They’re blundering around in the dark. It’s not their fault; the educational system has failed them. It’s as if somebody handed you a

Talking about Music

Tonight’s email brought a bulletin from Electronic Musician. These emails are just junk, and I mostly just delete them, but this one caught my eye. The bulk of each eMusician XTRA email is, frankly, repackaged press releases from manufacturers. This is fairly depressing, though not surprising. What little remains of what was once a respected journalistic undertaking is no more than a bundle of manufacturer press releases. Gotta stroke those advertisers, dude! Nothing else matters.

But the decline of the magazine publishing industry is not what I wanted to talk about. No, I have a bigger bee in my bonnet.

Headlining the email was a link to a video clip on the EM website. The clip is called “When Classical And Electronica Collide: Inside TechnoClassica 2.0.” The clip, prepared by EM editor Mike Levine, is about a project at Penn State University in which a classical ensemble (including string players and flutists) is combined with a computer rig, synthesizers, drums, and a rather large and fast-moving rear-screen video animation. The video clip is mostly an interview with developer Max Fomitchev, who teaches computer science at Penn State, but there’s also a little footage of the music being played onstage.

The sad and aggravating thing about the clip is that there’s not a word in it, not a single solitary word, about the music. The idea that there might actually be

Lost in the Clouds

Today I’m wandering around SoundCloud, checking out the electronic music. Here and there I stumble over a piece that’s not so bad that it makes my skin crawl, but they’re few and far between.

The composers (using the term very loosely) of these tracks seem to be almost entirely devoid of intelligence and imagination. But that’s not the worst of it. Their music lacks passion, emotion, drama. It’s dead.

In what follows, I’m going to avoid giving specific composers’ names. I’m not out to slam anybody in particular for their deficiencies. My critique is, rather, of an entire school of music-making; and by implication, I suppose, of the culture that fosters it.

Right now I’m listening to a soundscape recorded recently by an American. It’s more than an hour long. The first ten minutes, which is all I’ve heard and all I’m ever likely to hear, consists entirely of long sustained tones, vaguely stringlike or brassy in character. The tones swell slowly and die away slowly. A mostly diatonic scale in 12-note equal temperament is being used, but I can detect nothing in the way of a chord progression. The succession of tones seems almost random. Sometimes the texture is thicker, sometimes it’s thinner, but there’s never any rhythm and never any voice movement. Each long note is self-contained, with no apparent reference to anything else in the texture. I wouldn’t object to hearing 30 seconds of this sort of texture as an introduction to a piece. As a free-standing piece, however, one that leads nowhere, it’s about as animated and provocative as a dead raccoon lying in the middle of the street.

Another composer, also American, has uploaded a computer-generated piece, similar in shape (to the extent that a pillow can be said to have a shape) to the one described above, but consisting of a gradually thickening texture of microtonally pitched tones that beat against one another. The point of the piece, I think, is that the beats between not-quite-unisons gradually change over the course of ten or twelve minutes. Once the listener has got the idea (which takes a minute or so, because the texture unfolds in such a very gradual way), any further application of analytical intelligence would be superfluous. Of emotion there is not the faintest trace.

This same individual offers us a blessedly shorter track in which a synthesized piano plays an unending stream of eighth-notes. The notes are placed with metronomic precision at a constant tempo, and all have the same attack velocity. At first I thought I was hearing a chord progression, but it soon became apparent that the harmonic motion was somewhat random. The references to standard-practice progressions seem to have been more or less accidental. The piece is at a constant dynamic level and, for the most part, of a constant textural density from one end to the other. (There is a lessening of the density for a while in the middle, at a point where a melodic figure that Chopin might have plinked out at the age of five edges into view, repeats a couple of times, and then dies of exhaustion.) Emotion? None. Intelligence? None. Imagination? None. Beauty? None.

A Canadian offers us a 1-1/2 minute piece consisting entirely of a sort of bubbling, percolating texture — short tones with varying envelopes playing one at a time (no chords) in a rapid and uneven rhythm. The tones are processed by a pleasant reverb. The pitches appear to have been selected at random, so there isn’t even a hint of harmonic intelligence. The density of the texture does not vary during the piece, and no other sonic elements are introduced. I’d be inclined to call the piece a sketch, except that, in the context of hour-long pieces by other composers that exhibit just as little variety or color, it’s a good guess that the composer of this little etude has no intention of expanding it into a more dynamic or emotionally meaningful piece.

Earlier I listened to an hour-long soundscape by an Italian that was constructed (quite painstakingly) out of field recordings made on streetcorners in a city. The result was just as unfulfilling as you might expect, given the source material.

From Germany we have a composer uploading short and frantic noise pieces. The first one is built of layers of machine noise: Tearing sounds, liquid bleeps and gurgles, buzzing, and a dynamo starting and stopping, all of it jumbled together in a thick and incoherent stew. The second piece is even thicker, and has a minor triad hovering motionlessly within it. The third starts out with some nice electronic bell tones, but then the layers of noise pile on. No harmony, no melody, staggering rhythms but no meter — if you put this music on the stereo, your dog would slink out of the room with its tail between its legs. And your dog would be right.

Over on the other side of the aisle we have the dance techno wannabe’s, who exhibit just as little intelligence or emotion while pounding us with a relentless kick drum in 4/4.

I wonder: Has any of these alleged musicians ever mastered a conventional instrument? Played live in a small or large ensemble in front of a paying audience? Studied harmony theory, or listened to the symphonic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries? It seems doubtful. What we’re hearing here is, I would judge, mostly the creation of people who have been allowed or even encouraged to believe that ignorance is admirable, that expertise is irrelevant or suspect, and that all opinions about music are equally subjective, and therefore equally valid. They may sincerely believe that all that matters is originality or innovation.

There is such a thing as thought. There is such a thing as emotion. There is such a thing as structure. There is such a thing as being trained in a discipline. There is such a thing as wanting to communicate in some way with listeners.

It seems rather unlikely that any of these composers will ever understand any of that. But I’d prefer to be optimistic. Someday, they might learn.

Peerless

I know a few things about music, but there’s a lot that I don’t know. I’d like to be able to hang with a few people who are more knowledgeable than I, and who have time to share a few insights. I’d also like to hang with a few people who are on paths similar to my own, for mutual support and encouragement.

Nice idea. But it’s not going to happen in Livermore, I can tell you that. If there is anybody in town who even owns a synthesizer or a computer-based music production setup, how would I find them? There’s no store here in town that sells electronic music gear. There are no clubs where electronic music is played. There are no university music departments where it’s taught.

So tonight I’ve been poking around on the Internet, looking for long-distance peers. That’s pretty discouraging too.

The first thing I notice is that there’s very little discussion of the music itself. I watched a Howard Jones interview in which he talked about sending his Moog Prodigy in to be repaired, and read an interview with a couple of guys in Seattle who are building hardware. It’s easy to talk about gear.

I found a couple of sites with music I could listen to. Most of it bad, some of it not too bad. No idea who the artists are. A lot of the electronic music that I’m seeing on the Web is dance music. Dance music interests me slightly more than clipping my toenails.

I’m going to keep looking.