DISCORDATURA

Nearly ten years ago, I entered my first and only remix competition, the subject of which was the brilliant and inimitably bizarre German film & tv composer Peter Thomas. Not only did I not win a spot on the winners’ compilation, but I’m not sure the judges ever even heard the track. If they had, though, I wonder what they would have made of the inclusion of the exploding slide guitar and the… banjo? Really?

File this one under: What was I thinking?

There’s nothing revelatory in noting that the tools one uses to make music directly impact the resultant musical output. Like the simplest concept of gesture, whereby physiology, routine, muscle memory, and ease of playing all conspire together to give music composed on and performed by a specific instrument lend to the larger idea of “idiomatic”, that vernacular voice which acts as a fuzzy boundary around which all new ideas and push and pull, the various purposeful strengths and weaknesses of various software invariably lend their stamp on influencing the type of work an electronic composer finds themselves creating.

That’s all just a fancy way of saying that thanks to getting cozy with a piece of software named ACID once I began exploring the world of computer music, the sounds that found themselves coming from my headphones had taken on a far more loop-based, rhythmic, dare I say hiphop-ic character than anything prior. Partially out of laziness, partially out of fun, and eventually (embarrassingly so) out of the pursuit of profitable gain, music that was veering dangerously into dance (or worse yet, MC backing track) was defining the entire output of my time. At one point while romancing the vague possibility of having my electronic music picked up by a very reputable label (a fantasy that sadly fizzled just as it was seeming most promising) I cobbled together an assemblage of works-in-progress, all of which happened to have been rendered in that particular piece of software:

There’s no shortage of unfinished projects in my collection that were started in ACID, but listening to that compilation now, albeit 8 years since its creation, the limitations of the medium scream louder than all the work that had gone into it. The sheer layeredness of it all. The locked-in feel. And, while I know this is going to sound redundant as it’s the core mission of ACID’s compositional toolkit, the absolute, unbending loopiness.

The search is on, then, to line up the right tools for the right job, as the work I’m currently embarking on leans so heavily on the organic, the unpredictable, and the unrepetitive, it’s obvious that despite all best intentions, I have to be careful about the gesture, take heed of the subtle ways in which intention is being bent by the whim of the tool itself – yet do it without resorting back to the days of writing obscure performance instructions on a piece of paper, handing it to a stranger with an instrument, and letting fate work out the rest.

Thinking back to this bit of scrawl found submerged in a paper drift on my desk, dating back probably about a year and bearing an almost impossible to discern musical message, I’m wondering if it was intended to sound anything like this:

That’s the funny part. I really don’t remember what the hell it originally sounded like. There’s something there, though, something maybe worth exploring. I particularly like how the F natural moves so cleanly through the chord progression (showing up as an E# in the C# chord) but sounds so clangorous when left naked in the melody.

What it’s from: The hit list. At the moment, it’s a set of cues to be improvised by an ensemble, recorded, and then (conceivably, presumably) tactfully rearranged with some sequencing software to either a) stand alone as a completed piece or b) get played back alongside another ensemble tackling the same set of cues. Here are the roughs for numbers 10, 11, and 14.

My daughter generously contributed the colorization, which I should certainly think will find its way into the finished score.

Of course, that means I have to finish the score.

An aside… Just in case you desperately needed to hear yet another arrangement of Ave Maria, here you go.

Done as a sort of “parting gift” for a nonet of graduating string students a few years ago, this recording is of the read-through of the chart before performing it at their classmates’ ceremony. That’s the thing about doing arrangements: You don’t get to choose the piece, nor do you get to choose the occassion for the performance. The challenge of putting some hint of a personal stamp on projects like these is the fun part.

Soundbites aren’t the only layer of de-composed musical miscellany that litter my life. It’s fairly often – as attempts to jumpstart my creative output are regular, near seasonal occurrences – that amidst the snowdrift of paperwork that follows me from work to my bag to my bedside to underneath the bed to a folder in a box I find scraps of notation. Pieces that were scribbled down in haste, along with the thought that I was assumedly leaving myself enough crumbs of information to be able to get back and complete the idea when more time made itself apparent.

Obviously, there’s no level of information apart from a complete recorded score, preferably with a DVD-like commentary track where I explain in full, ridiculous detail to my future self, just what the hell I was thinking at the time.

Today, for example, I found this gem.

I’m going to take a few to ponder just what in the devil’s name that’s supposed to sound like, and then come back with a recorded interpretation… For laughs or whatnot.

One of the odder bits of phenomena that plagues the musician who composes solely at the computer is the moment when you realize there’s a notable gulf between the music you think you create and the music that just happens to be coming out of the speakers. A tidbit of a progression, hastily recorded, hinting at something worth investigating, slowly gets smothered by disparate ideas and ends up a chroma that’s altogether unintended. What I mean is: How often do computer musicians end up creating music that they otherwise would never listen to? Is recognizing that gulf a moment where one should back up, start over, abandon – or it a moment when one should let go and accept, using your trained faculties to merely bring a level of completeness to the image and let it live on its own merits?

It happened to me, quite often. For example: Here’s one trinket where a series of guitar chords, transcribed into music notation software, spit back out as MIDI and then tracked by a Rhodes softsynth, got blown way out of proportion to the point where I just assumed it was unfixable, and gave up. The question now is: How many steps back do I need to take to start feeling like I’m regaining ownership over the ideas, or is there some strange stubborn way I can work further forward?

My hard drives are riddled with ghosts.

Ever since it became apparent that the computers with which I’d previously saddled with solely cranking out the occasional analysis paper or sheet music score could be tricked into making music – without my even needing to talk to another living soul! – I started conning myself into believing that therein lay the key to throwing myself into a compositional solitude, a hidden den of trial and error crafting, where all would be revealed in finding my voice and from which I would later emerge like a petty illusionist, a fully formed artist, a musician. And through all those headphone-aided expeditions, left in its wake an enormous glut of audio detritus, broken artifacts left over from overzealous digging, spent candy wrappers, fresh ideas left in the sun too long until they grew a bit of fuzz and became destined for the compost bin, yet I kept copying and saving and moving these stupid little files, perhaps as a sad conciliatory gesture in memory of all the “good” stuff that had over time disappeared by accident or out of frustration or just forgetting.

The efforts pretty much fizzled out by 2004, which says a lot about the success of the plan to clarify and distill any sense of a musical vision. Big shock, in retrospect. Who would have thought that working in a closet (literally) would eventually lead to creative atrophy, revealing a personal weakness that I am not some brilliantly driven, self-contained perpetual music machine, but instead, like some lame ficus left neglected in a just-too-shady corner, my work only grows if it’s apparent, tended to in the open. In the end, though, I find I want to get back to it, this composing thing, whatever that means these days. With that in mind, we’re going to try the opposite route this time: A  completely public presentation of my pathetic attempt to get back on the bus and start cranking out some fine art product.

Thereby, this site will serve as a venue for that reentry into the world of creating music. Hopefully, this flipside approach of transparent, work-in-progress reflection, unapologetic and unembarrassed will lead to a better understanding of why there’s something nagging me to make music along with some gentle clues on what said music actually sounds like, and why, and how…