Writing About Music

Notation isn’t music. It’s a way of writing about music. What’s good about writing out our music, using notation, is that it gets our ideas out of our heads, which makes them both easier to edit and possible to share with others. What’s bad, though, is that it a step between the creative spirit and a usable expression object. Notation is cumbersome. Part of the craft of becoming a musician, of whatever stripe, is to become comfortable enough with notation so that it’s less of a barrier between us and our music. In my experience, this is a lifelong quest.

Analogous struggles exist in other forms of expression. Writers struggle with words, not to mention typing. Photographers struggle with lighting, aperture settings, shutter speed, and so on. I’m going to give you some examples of exercises borrowed and adapted from various genres of art, in hopes that it will help the process become easier, whatever you do.

By the way, this post comes in response to a reflection by my friend Menina, who is a sculptor living in Italy. She was invited on short notice to participate in an exhibition of her work, and in considering what additional work should be created for it, was pondering the question of quality vs. quantity. Of course, it’s the high quality work that cuts through, and is the reason why we’re doing what we do. But sometimes, how much we focus on something or how hard we try doesn’t have much bearing on the quality of the end result. Sometimes in our work, it makes sense to obsess endlessly over details. But other times, it makes more sense to shoot out a lot of stuff quickly, and then stand back to see what sticks.

The exercises I discuss below will likely lead to a lot of mediocre results. That’s good; the point is developing your process, not creating a masterwork.

Try these.

1. Take a sheet of music manuscript paper and a pen. Take ten minutes, and as fast as you can, fill the page with notation. Don’t think about what it sounds like. Just write. Don’t pause, don’t cross out or erase. Just write. Fill it up. Get crazy. Bored of eighth notes? Write a septuplet. Change time signatures. Change key signatures. Or clef. It’s gibberish. Just fill the page. When you’re done, feel free to just throw it out. Or, wait a day or a week or a year, and then try to play it. This exercise was given to me by my mentor William Thomas McKinley on a day that he felt I was going around in circles, and also that my rhythms were too predictable. He told me to do it while riding the T home, rather than my usual quiet room without distractions. I brought him the results the next week, and being the brilliant pianist he is, he sightread it perfectly, even though to me, it was awfully complex. It was actually the best writing I had done to date—much more rhythmically free. I tried to argue that it didn’t count, as I was writing random stuff without thinking about it, but he asked me, who wrote it, then, if I didn’t? It felt random, but subconsciously, I was still making decisions, if by eye rather than by ear. It was really one of the best teaching moments I ever experienced.

2. Take just two hours and write and record a song, from beginning to end. After it’s done, stop, and do something else. Weed your garden, maybe, or bake cookies. Don’t listen to it for a while. If you don’t have a complete recording in two hours, you cheated. Do it again the next day, but don’t reuse the material from the first day. This will force you to organize your time. If you’re an hour in and you’re still writing lyrics, you need to change directions and simplify. If you’re just starting recording with twenty minutes left, you probably don’t have time to program in a full band accompaniment into your DAW. Stepping away from this exercise, we have to do similar kinds of time organization all the time, on a larger scale, and it’s good to get a quick snapshot of the process.

3. Here’s one for songwriting. Write and record one verse. Then write and record five different choruses to go with that verse, using the standard forms. Cut and paste so that you have audio versions of all possible pairings. Wait a day or so and then listen. Which is best? It’s like speed dating. Spend two minutes talking to someone, then switch chairs and try someone new. At the end, who did you like best? Doing this with creative projects is helpful because it teaches non-attachment to our work, which gives us the necessary objectivity to make tough decisions about it. If you’ve written only one song, it’s tough to admit that it stinks and you should chuck it. If you’ve written twenty, that becomes easier. Try to have written twenty songs, if you haven’t already.

4. Steal something, but disguise it so well nobody will ever notice. Take a favorite song, change its mode, tempo, even its time signature. Change details of the story, like making love hate or he a she, or make it about a penguin instead of a waitress. Change the chord progression and harmonic rhythm. Change the rhyme scheme of the lyrics. Instead of a different second line of the chorus, repeat the first one. Change the title. Make it unrecognizable. Its relationship to the original is your little secret. You just used it as a scaffold to create something new.

5. I went through a brief period, about fifteen years ago, when I got fed up with music and decided to be a photographer instead. I did a six-month intensive degree in photography. This digression only lasted a couple years, but I found many of the skills transferable, and the best lesson I had was a workshop in studio lighting. It started with a lecture on how to use the various types of studio lighting gear. Getting the relationship right between the power of the various lights (main, fill, hair, background) was a little confusing. We then broke into groups of three, to practice. My compatriots and I devised a really great way to spend an hour. We took turns changing three roles: photographer, timekeeper/assistant, and model. Every two minutes we’d switch, no matter where we were in the process. After a few rounds, we were thinking much less about math and much more about how to make the model look good. It became automatic. I realized, this was like practicing scales. What’s the rock band equivalent? Making the technical become automatic is a really important aspect of creating art, whatever the form.

The big question is, what’s hard for you? Isolate it as best you can, and then create some kind of exercise to make the solution to it automatic. It’s as much a part of writing, or any art, as it is for instrumental technique.