How to Write a Song

Before I dive into this one, I'll let my good friend Gulley Jimson have at it:

But one day when I was sitting in our London office on Bankside, I dropped a blot on an envelope; and having nothing to do just then, I pushed it about with my pen to try and make it look more like a face. And the next thing was I was drawing figures in red and black, on the same envelope. And from that moment I was done for.

It's just that easy! Really. For quite a while, I had a very positive, but not too intimate relationship with songs. I listened to them, sang them, had some opinions, but write them?... no, I could never do that. That's something only other people do. How do you even do that?

Then one day, I had my Gulley Jimson moment. It was a little less dramatic — I was sitting at a piano — but it felt similarly sudden. I was doing what one is supposed to do in a situation, a temptation appeared, I met it, and now my friends are extremely patient with me.

This trip down memory lane was triggered by some recent housekeeping. Despite my background in composition as an exercise in dot-drawing, my song notations have been very informal.* I work in a spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook with disposable ballpoint pens. I like this arrangement for its frugality, simplicity, and unpretentiousness. The pages have space enough to work and pre-marked margins. They don't distract from the work at hand. I write lyrics with chord symbols. As ABBA (via SM) said, if I can't remember my own melodies, who else will?

One built-in of this notation scheme is that songs can become a little organic. I find this ultimately benefits the quality of the writing. However, it's been a little over two years since my Gulley Jimson moment and I decided it was time for a little more precise notation. My memory is sure right now... but I wanted to get things down while they're still sure. So, I fired up Sibelius and went at it. It was fun. I saw what improvements I've made at this or that. I found some moments where it seemed like I was really listening. I was proud of those.

Back to the original question: how do you write a song? My photography teacher in high school offered us a cheeky definition of art: it's whatever artists make. To that, I offer a corollary: you make art by making art. I don't want to underplay the ineffabilities inherent to the process. The sourceless surprises are part of continuing pleasure of it, but there's no denying the dumb earthiness in it. You want to draw a face? Well pick up yer pigment and press it to paper. You want to talk technique and other niceties, that's really a separate conversation. Songwriting became possible for me when I recognized those were separate attitudes.

---

* What impressionable young experimentalist wouldn't find reading Cage's Notations a radical experience? For all that was in that book, what does it say that my strongest memory of it, what seemed like the most radical notation, was its inclusion of "The Word," lyrics only, attributed to "The Beatles"? (That I was at risk of becoming a songwriter?)

Music: What Happened?

I just got caught up on Scott Miller's Music: What Happened? series, which he wrapped up last month. All his pieces are extremely well-written, -observed, -heard, and -worth reading.

Why Rhyme?

The wag in me wants to ask the question in a broader existential sense (such as how someone with bipolar disorder would ask "why get out of bed?"), but let's start small. More specifically, beyond the effect of "words that sound like other words," what tools do rhymes provide to a lyricist? A few for your consideration:

The sex you're trading up for what you hope is love

Is just another thing that he'll be careless of₁

In the most basic sense, rhymes connect words and give them some kind of larger shape. The rhyme here makes a long thought feel whole. The connection between love and of, however, is essentially utilitarian.

Having her on my brain's like getting hit by a train

She's gonna kill me. Oh Celeste, oh Celeste.₂

Here there's a little more meat in the connection. It illuminates something less familiar about the words being rhymed.

I'll pretend I'm jealous of all the fellas

And if that don't do then I'll try something new₃

Smokey Robinson makes those connections with the sort of language you'd use in casual conversation. That's why he's a great poet.

On a ferris wheel looking out on Coney Island

There are more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand₄

You can't talk about rhymes in songwriting without mentioning funny lyrics. The rhyme sneaks up on you and snaps the joke into place.

I'd go to hell for yuh, even Philadelphia!₅

Sometimes the joke's in the rhyme itself.

Although she's none the wiser, although we've barely met

I can recognize her from the treatment that I get₆

Rhymes have a kind of gravitational pull that you can align with musical phrases.

Look at the day dressed in copper lamé and it's trying your glass slippers on

I sit in the dark and I listen to Mark asking where has that last firefly gone₇

In this way, harmonious combinations of words can become their own kind of music, something interesting to chew on with the melody.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Hopefully, it points to some of the magic in words that can get you to pick up the pen every day.

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₁Aimee Mann, "You Do"

₂Old 97's, "Timebomb"

₃Smokey Robinson, "I'll Try Something New"

₄Stephin Merritt, "Strange Powers"

₅Lorenz Hart, "Any Old Place with You"

₆Jon Brion & Aimee Mann, "I Believe She's Lying"

₇Franklin Bruno, "In A Sourceless Light"

The 101st

The 101st
Franklin Bruno
available on Local Currency: Solo 1992-1998

Intro:
F# B / / | F# / B / | x4

Verse:
g#
Why does the front of my new notebook say
F#
"College ruled" when I know it sucked?
g#
Flat-out fucked in the aqueduct as we
F#
Cross the garden to take a look around.

Interlude:
a# / / / | / / / / | C# / / / | / / / / |
d#add9 / / / | / / / / | C# / / / | Badd9 / / / |

Verse:
Frozen hands couldn't play guitar, so I
Inventoried my penny jar.
Spiral-bound couldn't make a sound, so I
rooted 'round in the mulch and found--

Chorus:
   a#             g#        B
The hundredth song about you said the
a#                g#   B     cdim
Same thing as the very first I
a#/C#       a#       d#           a#
Came across before I opened up my drawer.
  a#/C#             a#
So excuse me while I burst into the 101st.

Intro

Bridge:
          a#                      d#
There's an accordion file and it's wheezing away
D                  A       C#
Sixteen, seventeen hours a day.
         F#                              a#
With your Debordian guile there's nothing left to survey.

Verse:
The broken glass on the backyard path
You could cut your foot where the TV smashed.
Like copper coils from the polygraph
As you weed the wheat out and save the chaff.

Chorus:
The hundredth song about you said the
Same thing as the very first I
Came across before I opened up my drawer.
Unrevised and unrehearsed, just like the 101st.

Intro (end on a#)

***

Is this even a song?

I mean that more metaphysically than physically. The song's got some formal irregularities (the form suggests AABA-with-chorus more than it is one, the rhyme scheme in the verses verges on free-associative), but those seem largely irrelevant. Franklin Bruno's written enough by-the-book songs that it should be safe to assume intent here.

The lyrics help us out a little more, specifically the chorus. We find out the speaker has written 100 love songs about the same person. He launches into the next section by proclaiming he's about to start into #101, i.e., the 101st of the title. So really, this isn't a song, this is a song coming into being. That seems to justify the verses' free associations.

Isn't that weird?

***

I would like to develop a format for presenting tabs I've done with some commentary on what got me excited about the song, i.e., something that's mixes the practical and academic. I'll be playing with the proportions between the two, but please leave any comments for improvement below.

Re: The New Math

I had a request for explication on this post, so here goes. Software's a more familiar concept:

• It usually can't be had for less than $15, usually a bit more.
• You probably wouldn't qualify it as an impulse purchase.
• It has a reputation that transcends whatever platform it's on. People happily use MS Office on the Mac and get cranky when the feature set doesn't line up with the PC version.
• It is the product that the company wants to sell.
• It's often a tool that can be used for work: office suite, photo editor, etc.
• You may use it as part of collaborative work, but your regular use probably doesn't involve someone else sitting at the same terminal with you.

Apps, on the other hand:

• Are often free, typically no more than $5.
• They're cheap enough to buy on a whim.
• The brand they help is usually that of the host platform. Apple will run an ad to show you some of the more interesting apps you can get for the iPhone, but the ad is ultimately for the iPhone.
• A large company will often offer something for free so their brand has a presence on the device. It can be a gimme to get people to draw people to their core product.
• It's often an object for play. People get excited about the app that tells them what's playing over the bar's PA, less so about the tip calculator.
• It's often used as an object for social play and status, with people you're physically near: "check out this neat app that I got!"

This last distinction is where things get interesting. Software has historically been an extension for office appliances. The ubiquity of powerful, portable devices, low cost of their add-on software, and intended use of that software has produced different from the original vision behind desktop computing. "Social" is an overused buzzword nowadays, but here's one place where a little more exploration is in order.

Concord Chamber Players at Concord Academy

Gandolfi Commission, Fine Bartok, Herald Concord Chamber Music Society 10th Anniversary

The Boston Music Intelligencer

Ethics & Aesthetics, or "I can't believe my brother watches reality TV!"

I've been watching this show called Kitchen Nightmares. Each episode features a different restaurant that has hit the skids. Gordon Ramsey swoops in (via SUV, sports car, motorcycle, or Amtrak, depending on the location) to set them back on the righteous path.

Viewers familiar with his other shows will recognize his foul-mouthed persona. He never misses an opportunity to scream and castigate. He's a ready-made Guy Who Makes a Scene, an archetype that our culture has a lurid fascination with these days.

At least, that's how he comes off initially. He's never short on bile, but he lacks the selfishness that usually comes with GWMSs. He doesn't have the imperial aim of leaving little Londons in his wake. Instead, he lines up the restaurant's existing strengths with any untapped market niches he spots around town. One restaurant was advised to step away from fine dining, because what the neighborhood really needed was a place to get a decent burger. So what's his problem?

He's not angry that they can't cook fish his way. He's angry that they can't cook fish the right way. He has a set of aesthetics, a set of values that he feels to be universal and inviolable (so much for the death of the monoculture). Ramsey's more astonished that those chefs aren't offended by themselves than he's offended by them (his display of that happens to allow him to benefit from this cultural moment).

Plenty of people on the show get in a huff over Ramsey's behavior, but he has every authority to act as he does. His personality is well-documented and he is asked by the restaurant owners help them out. They should know what they're in for. But what about day-to-day stuff with us plebes? Is it okay for me yell at a performing musician if he's out of tune? How about a hissy fit if a co-worker named a variable poorly? Is there accounting for taste? In short, do aesthetics have moral force?

This is where things get hazy fast. It can be tempting to confront people (there's that cultural moment again!), but your right to do so ultimately depends on which cultural communities the parties involved belong to. These communities affect quite a bit of life, from how much you owe in taxes to whether your roommate thinks you actually cleaned the bathroom. The chefs in that clip belonged to a community that didn't mind over-cooked fish. When Ramsey came into the picture, they implicitly asked to join his and were turned away at the gate. They end up choosing to leave the restaurant over changing their behaviors. Struggles between communities go on every day in big and little ways. And as it turns out, they make for good television.

The New Math

Apps != Software

(that took too long to realize)

Year in Reviews

I may've been off the blogging circuit for a little while, but I haven't stopped writing about music online:

• Fenwick Smith’s Thirty-third Annual Jordan Hall Recital Offered Wide Range of Material, 14 Sep 2009
• Frisson of the New at Mass MoCA, 03 Aug 2009 (if you read just one, read this one)
• Musical Insurrection to Institution: Bang on a Can, 08 Jul 2009
• BEMF’s Chamber Orchestra: Delightful One-To-A-Part Affair, 14 Jun 2009
• Turandot: Cipher of an Opera, 02 Jun 2009
• Juventas Presents Two Chamber Operas, 10 May 2009
• Oddball Program, Communal Group, 27 Apr 2009
• NESE Offers Program Heralding Upcoming Ballets Russes 2009, 06 Apr 2009
• Collage Offers Bold Gestures, Hints of Opera, and a Knockout, 02 Mar 2009
• Stimulating Presentation of Underplayed Repertoire, 13 Nov 2008

Resurrection

So, it's time to give this blogging thing another go. It's been a while, but I've got some new ideas on what to do with this space. There'll be fewer multi-page musico-analytical sprawl-jobs, more breadth and variety.

FWIW, sometime in the past two years, blogs stopped being the it format online. Blogs are everywhere. Every content-spewing website has their formal writings and each writer has at least one blog for letting their hair down. Can you really be cool as a blogger in this kind of environment? The edgy stuff has shifted to Twitter and other so-called social sites, but I'll leave those media to the prospectors for now. Staidness, predictability, and boredom have their distinct delights.

As they say, more to come.

The Jingler

For those who have always wondered "What If?" a certain composer penned a Christmas tune, the internet finally gives us the opportunity to find out:

"Merry Christmas" from Corey Dargel
"Feliz Navidad" from Peter Garland
"Kedves Karácsony" from György Ligeti
"Frohe Weihnachten" from Anton Webern
BONUS TRACK: "Merry Christmas" from Tay Zonday

Make your own instant classics with The Jingler.

Theremin Robot Plays Gnarls Barkley

Left-handed piano

As usual, you can find anything on craigslist.

Composers and the People Who Love Them

This quote is for anyone who thought that composers/musicians/artists had the market cornered on considerate spouses/significant others. It's from Founders at Work, a book of interviews with founders of technology startups:

Surely your wife was nervous about you sleeping only 4 hours every 2 days?

She was. She got me one of those fold-out futons that would fold under my desk. She didn't like me sleeping on the floor.

The whole book is pretty fascinating. Sometimes you forget that there are people behind the fancy consumer technology that we encounter on a daily basis. There's no archetypal story that informs the lives of each interviewee. Some of them had a vision and made a calculated plan to achieve it. Others thought it would be cool to have their own company and worried about the details as they went. Nevertheless, they share similar passions and drives to create. Really, not that different from composers in many respects.

Reading Comprehension

One of my roommates is currently preparing to take the LSAT. He shared with me this question from one of his prep books:

In recent years the early music movement, which advocates performing a work as it was performed at the time of its composition, has taken on the character of a crusade, particularly as it has moved beyond the sphere of medieval and baroque music and into music from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. Granted, knowledge about the experience of playing old music on now-obsolete instruments has been of inestimable value to scholars. Nevertheless, the early music approach to performance raises profound and troubling questions. [...]

The passage continues to discuss such hard-hitting issues as instrument design, tempo choices, and applause etiquette (!). Who would've expected to see these questions posed outside our own [blogo]sphere. Here are a couple samples:

The author suggests that the final movements of symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven might be played more slowly by today's orchestras if which one of the following were to occur?

1. orchestras were to use instruments no more advanced in design than those used by orchestras at the time Mozart and Beethoven composed their symphonies
2. audiences were to return to the custom of applauding at the end of each movement of a symphony
3. audiences were to reserve their most entusiastic applause for the most brilliantly played finales
4. conductors were to return to the practice of playing the chords on an orchestral piano to keep the orchestra together
5. conductors were to conduct the symphonies in the manner in which Beethoven and Mozart had conducted them

The author suggests that the modern audience's tendency to withhold applause until the end of a symphony's performance is primarily related to which one of the following?

1. the replacement of the orchestral piano as a method of keeping the orchestra together
2. a gradual increase since the time of Mozart and Beethoven in audiences' expectations regarding teh ability of orchestral musicians
3. a change since the early nineteenth century in audiences' concepts of musical excitement and intensity
4. a more sophisticated appreciation of the structural integrity of the symphony as a piece of music
5. the tendency of orchestral musicians to employ their most brilliant effects in the early movements of symphonies composed by Mozart and Beethoven

For the record, my roommate's got his money on answers 2 and 3, respectively.

Devil's Advocate

Just when I thought music was dead, I get wind that we've got ourselves a savior. Thank goodness.

In related news, a few people recently got bit by the "compression is bad" bug. Now, I'm hardly going to argue with the general complaint. However, I think it's worth pointing out that compression is a tool just like any other. Good cooks use only enough salt so that you don't taste it, you know? The IEEE piece focused on such "overseasoning" issues, but there are recordings that use extreme compression quite artfully. Take a look at the waveform of Fiona Apple's "Limp":


Parts of the track are quite compressed and quite loud. They are preceded, though, by quieter sections with a more pronounced dynamic range. The contrast makes the aggressive refrains ("call me crazy / hold me down / make me cry / get off now / baby") more aggressive. The more delicate verses pick up more tension and uncertainty than a more consistent dynamic range might've suggested. Those max amp spikes you see in the last refrain are when the drums come in to accent "baby," pushing the song over the emotional edge it had been otherwise holding back from.

An entire album of music like this would be very fatiguing. The song which follows on the album ("Love Ridden") has an entirely different attitude:


The softer instrumentation (no percussion, only piano and strings) and dynamic range give your ears a chance to rest without forcing a break in the action.

Categories

I wish record stores would have no categories and just jam everyone in alphabetically. Curveballs of the day: Nico Muhly and Daniel Bernard Romaine ("feat. Philip Glass") popping up in pop. I had to walk from pop/rock to hip-hop/rap for Kanye West, but that confusion is at least understandable. One of my friends, a former record store employee, once recounted a zinger of a job interview question: where do you put John Cage? I know most people would come looking for him in classical (the most ambiguous placard of the lot), but I'd file him under folk just to see who was paying attention.

Allez Musique!

I usually try to hold off from link-and-run type posts, but this is too good to pass up: ANALOG arts ensemble has announced Iron Composer Omaha, a composition competition (no entry fee, kids) modeled after a certain kitschy cooking show. I'm glad to see that they're combining bad theater with new music, but I hope they follow through on the Iron Chef format with commentary (who is the Alton Brown of new music?), play-by-play, and interviews. As any viewer of Iron Chef knows, the fun isn't just in the challenge of the secret ingredient, but in the whole process of watching the chefs work.

What Begets What?

One of my recent musical projects has been playing with Reason, a piece of software that gives you a virtual rack (literally, check out the screenshots) of electronic instruments to configure and combine at will. The interface is both charming and infuriating (how do you use a mouse to turn a dial exactly?), but its real-life-ness makes for a pretty minimal learning curve. All those knobs are pretty easy to turn when you've got a decent MIDI controller, anyway.

Finding new tools and instruments is usually a source of creative stimulation. They give you a new way of conceptualizing music/sound. Since Reason is tied to the metaphor of recorded music (you usually want to pipe all of your virtual instruments through a virtual mixer), it encourages you to think of music spatially (balance and positioning) and timbrally (you can record a track and alter the instrument independently of the notes in the sequencer). Since I tend to think of my notated acoustic music in similar ways, Reason has fit in very well with my workflow.

Live music (at least performed by others) is honestly an infrequent experience for me. I think it's fair to say that most people in my generation largely experience music through recordings. This attitude occasionally reveals itself through the scores of people my age. Dynamic markings are usually used to indicate relative volume levels, not variations in tone. I've even heard people talk about ensemble blend in terms of a "mix." Because of how people tend to conceptualize music now, I wonder if more young composers would do well to try out some form of electronic music.

For another take on the relationship between instruments and the music they're used to make, check out Bassline Baseline, a documentary on the TB-303.

The New

The latest issue of the New Yorker has brought us a taste of Alex Ross's upcoming history of modern music, via an article on Sibelius. One of the threads running through the article is the question of conservative-or-radical that dogged Sibelius throughout his career. To me, this question is one of the slimiest remnants of modernism that the (classical) music world can't seem to shake itself from. The people must know: is the music "new"?

This question deals strictly with language. Who cares if you're saying something simple-minded with your music; all that matters is that you find a shiny package to put it in. Yes, there are situations where the package does say something notable. The expressionism of early Schoenberg (for example) projects a unique worldview which is stimulating to parse. My beef is with people who write off composers based on their sound without considering any other aspects of the music.

Alex's take on Sibelius ends with the suggestion there are other composers out there with unrecognized radical streaks. There's something weird about this whole game. The whole, is Sibelius a conservative symphonist or a forefather of spectralism? Do Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions point the way to a new conception of music or are they an idiosyncratic rehash of Baroque counterpoint? Peter Garland came up with the term "radical consonance" to describe his own music. And we composers claim we're so misunderstood...

One of my favorite music history books is the Allan Atlas book on the Renaissance from Norton. Atlas didn't try to force the music into an all-encompassing narrative. His book basically had the feel of "this thing happened, then this thing, and then this random thing that no one saw coming..." Kyle Gann got close to this approach in his American music book, but he stuck mostly to what he felt was the aesthetic cutting-edge of each generation.

This issue is not limited to the classical world either. When I took a class in the analysis of rock music, my professor claimed that the novelty of New Wave was superficial and that the real innovations of the time were going on in so-called corporate rock.

My question: what would conversations about music be like if people weren't so obsessed with the macho oneupsmanship of "innovation," if instead of separating composers based on stylistic traits, we talked about the commonalities of their humanistic pursuits? What does it say that we're so hung up on these particular notions?