Writing About Music

Cross-footing is an accounting term that seems ripe for more abstract usage and applicability. Traditionally, cross-footing refers to a technique for double-checking numbers. The idea is that after you total up a column of numbers, you then do that calculation from another dimension. If both calculations yield the same result, you can be reasonably sure that they are accurate. If the totals vary, you can be positive that you’ve made an error somewhere.

For example, say that a pianist wants to calculate daily expenses for a three-stop concert tour. He sets up a spreadsheet showing all the expenses, with a total column at the right. Then, he totals up the daily totals (below, $650, $675, $695) and arrives at the overall tour total: $2,020.

To double-check this calculation, he can total up each of the expense categories and list them at the bottom (or “foot”) of each column. Hotel expenses, for example, add up to $400. Then, to cross-foot the calculation, he can do a second total calculation across the bottom total row: 400, 150, 300, 150, 120, 900. If that foot total matches the total arrived at by adding together each line total, then he can be pretty sure that the resulting number of $2020 is correct.

If the two separate calculations don’t give the same result, it means that somewhere, he’s made an error, and so he needs to go back and check the numbers to figure out where. But if the cross-footing calculation yields the same total, then he’s good. That’s cross-footing.

In an abstract sense, this process of cross-footing—of examining something from multiple dimensions—can serve as a helpful reality check for many kinds of significant calculation, strategy, or other problem or circumstance being explored.

Some examples:

• To double-check that there will be enough chairs and music stands onstage, after reviewing the stage setup diagrams, a stage manager examines a concert program and counts the number of musicians listed. Do those numbers match?
• When doing quality control on a CD master, in addition to listening all the way through, an artist does a pass focusing on only the transitions between tracks, listening to the last ten seconds on one into the first ten seconds on the next, just to check that one dimension of the mastering engineer’s work.
• When developing a set of songs, to make sure she’s keeping up sufficient variety and not getting into a rut, a songwriter draw a chart of various technical characteristics of all songs on the table, and look for trends. She lists the key, tempo, subject matter, meter, mood, and whatever else she wants to track. If the current set is all E-minor slow love ballads, it’s worth considering whether breaking out of that would be an improvement.

Song Diversity Matrix

The natural tendency with most kinds of work is to be more reactive than strategic, making decisions based the information immediately in front of us, acting solely on intuition, and taking the quickest route possible to resolving the current issue. Sometimes, though, it’s also important to take a step back and consider matters from a more strategic perspective.

Musicians often naturally have many ideas, particularly regarding their art. Applying this same native idea-generation ability towards improving problem-solving and planning issues can help reduce risk and ultimately improve results.