Writing About Music

Writers, like other creative artists, struggle with the relationship between two related, and often confused activities: expression vs. articulation. Navigating this is critical for creating effective work.

Expression means bringing something that’s inside of you out. Your soul stirs, and you write something down. This is an over-arching motivation for why creative artists spend their time creating. They perceive something they feel has value, and want to share it with others.

Articulation means crafting a communication object. It involves looking at an outpouring of raw expression and adjusting it so that a reader (listener, watcher, whatever) will understand what you’re trying to express.

Editing (including self-editing) is the process of honing the communication object for optimized communication.

I find three questions helpful, when editing, that help preserve the original intent while making communication as effective as possible. When I teach this in my writing seminars, I call it “Feist’s Trident.” Someday, maybe somebody else will call it that too.

Feist’s Trident

The questions I ask when reviewing something:

1. What’s the Big Idea?
2. What’s in?
3. What’s out?

Say that you are charged with optimizing the following sentence. (I made it especially horrible, just for you.)

“It is my opinion, based on my thirty years as an educator and performing pianist, that pianists at all levels of expertise and proficiency must remember to memorize all types of inversion—first, second, and third—so that they are to avoid creating musically ineffective and unsuccessful comping parts.”

First question: What’s the Big Idea?

It can take several readings to figure this out. Here, the writer seems to be saying that there is a body of information (inversions) that is important for pianists to learn.

Next, we go word by word, phrase by phrase, and ask the next two questions of each element: what’s in/what’s out? In other words, what supports the Big Idea? Ruthlessness will serve you well, here.

The first bit, from “It….performing pianist,” is a common sledgehammer, designed to inspire the sense that the point coming up is worth reading. But readers already think the writer is credible, or else they would stop reading. So, that whole first bit can be “out,” and we can begin “Pianists….” Omitting useless text like this generally helps articulate a point.

“Pianists” seems an important word here, so we keep it in, for now, but “…at all levels of experience and proficiency” is redundant, so it’s out. “Memorizing” is relevant, so we keep it! “Must remember” is just bossy, “all types” with “first, second, third,” are unnecessary.

Let’s see what we’re keeping, so far:

“Pianists must memorize inversions, if they are to avoid creating musically ineffective and unsuccessful comping parts.”

That’s getting much closer to the Big Idea. But it’s quite bossy and negative. Here’s a more positive rendering, still keeping the Big Idea. I’ve done a bit more massaging to get more useless verbiage “out.” Now that we’re closer to the mark, it seems that “Pianists” is likely obvious, as we’re discussing comping parts, and the whole work is likely about “pianists” anyway.

“Memorizing inversions helps you create effective comping parts.”

Now, that’s a much more useful sentence! The Big Idea is now clear. Certainly, though, confirm with that author that you did, in fact, nail their intended big idea. When editing is as drastic as this, points are likely to be mistaken, somewhat. The author might say, “Actually, I want to emphasize that learning them is what’s important, not memorizing them.” Or “I meant memorizing inversion fingerings.” Omitting some of the chaff helps everyone focus in on what the main point to be articulated should be.

The goal in the process was to articulate a point. The raw expression object was hindered by words and thoughts that were distracting. Honing focus and gleefully eliminating words that didn’t serve the main purpose helped achieve the real goal: communication.

Good writing optimizes the use of good words and minimizes the use of bad words.

Good words are expressive. They communicate clearly. That’s the goal of all writing, but especially so when trying to teach music, which is so technical.

One of my favorite words is “inspire,” just because of what it means, and because it hasn’t been ruined yet by overuse. Another word I like a lot is “disaster,” for its etymology: dis- (against) aster (stars). It’s not just bad, it’s a catastrophe on a grand, astrological, universal scale. Even the stars are against it!

While curse words are traditionally considered bad words, I actually think they are pretty good. They are charged with emotion and can be an effective way to communicate, when used well. If I were to write f— or s—, everyone would jump! That said, curse words often suffer from a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. They are commonly used unnecessarily in contexts that don’t really demand it, and often inject anger into situations where love or calm would be more appropriate. Though they are our most energy-charged words, when used as generic intensifiers, they lose their oomph. So, if you cherish them as I do, handle them with care, and save them for special occasions.

In polite discourse, curse-word substitutes can be more effective than the actual curse words themselves. “Frickin’” (also “fricken” or “freaking”) is a good example. It means “accursed.” It’s a way of saying, “I’m usually too much of a gentle person to swear, but this circumstance is driving me to it!” I also like punctuation substitutions for swearing. I’ve standardized on @!!*&, over the years. Four characters might be better, but I like the excitement factor of the double exclamation points, and that assortment of punctuation just has a nice, balanced look to it. The unusual characters give the sense of the “word” being outside the parameters of what’s normal. That makes readers perk up. Similarly, words that are a little outside casual usage can give a text life. That goes for lyrics, too.

Truly bad words are those that distract from communication, and in the highly complex and technical world of writing about music, clarity is what makes the writing useful. Consider this sentence:

“You must practice these fingerings.”

In this context, the first two words, “You must,” are bad words. They steal the verb’s thunder and only add clutter, not real value. They are such common words that they essentially serve as filler here. So, in fact, what makes a word good or bad is its context. In another circumstance, “you” might be perfect!

Here’s a modified version of that sentence. It is so much more poignant with the bad words taken out:

“Practice these fingerings.”

Much clearer! Also, “You must” made the original communication unnecessarily personalized and bossy, and that’s another distraction, here. When giving instructions, avoid anything that diminishes the clarity like that. The tasks at hand are difficult enough to teach without cluttering up our writing with bad words.

Know what I’m frickin’ saying?

Writing books tends to drive musicians bonkers, particularly towards the end of the process when we’re fussing with minutia, reviewing proofs, cleaning up the final punchlist of details, and awaiting the final endlessly long march to the printer. Authors get crabby. There are two primary reasons why, in my opinion:

1. Books are persistent artifacts of an author’s best work and best thinking, and so getting books exactly right is intertwined with perceptions of self worth. At the end of the project, we feel stuck with its limitations, and are running out of time to make it the perfect, most holistic statement of who we are.

2. Musicians need to create actual music. Writing books about music is not the same as making music, and towards the end of the process, we get antsy because it’s been such an incredibly laborious distraction from what we need to be our primary life focus: making music.

(I won’t offer a third reason: that they are getting fed up with me torturing them…. That couldn’t be the case, could it?!)

An antidote to the first one, about identity, is to plan to write a series of books in your life that will collectively articulate a part of your persona, but more importantly to realize that no book could ever possibly do a soul justice. Books just don’t have that capability.

An antidote to the third one, if it exists (and I’m sure it does not), is to know that I will leave you alone very soon.

The middle one is what I really want to discuss. This past weekend, I took my boys to visit Sue (Gedutis) Lindsay and her family. Sue is a friend, musician, and fellow editor of Berklee Media projects. Here are Annie Lindsay and Forrest Feist munching on French fries, before we went to Plimoth Plantation.

We were catching up, and I was complaining about being generally crabby, and I mentioned feeling a bit far from music these days, when I seem to spend all my time talking and writing about music, rather than actually creating the real thing.

She offered a bit of wisdom that I feel is important to pass on. Cynical Sue said (and I paraphrase), “Musicians are special people, and we need to be creating music all the time, to feel normal.” She discussed her own journey through various distractions that were almost, but not quite, music, including writing books, research, teaching, and so forth. It’s not that these aren’t worthy, fun, and even necessary undertakings. We must call them “pseudo-musical activities,” though, and doing the real thing is where it’s really at. We must carve out time to create real music, for sanity’s sake, and be ferociously protective of this time.

So, I’m looking at life, and counting directions. I have my family (including two little boys), an old/maintenance-needing house, endless yard work, I serve on three town boards (chairing one), there’s my full-time gig at Berklee Press, part-time teaching Finale online, a variety of neglected hobbies, a few assorted other obligations, plus protecting my flock of chickens/ducks/geese from that hungry fox….. Quite a lot happening here, which all conspire to create distance from that spiritual life engine called music, which is the primary force that can keep me relatively sane and whole, but which is now at arm’s length. And I feel it poignantly this November, as days grow short and the world grows cold.

Prioritization is increasingly a necessary life’s skill for me, and I would venture, for anyone, as life developments bring increasing directions without offering us more hours in the day.

Arthur Cunningham, my first composition teacher and life mentor, once said to me, “I promise you that if you write every day, you will improve.”

So, here’s my thought/recommendation:

Create music every day.

Even if it’s for five minutes, you need to touch that fire, no how busy you are, and no matter how deeply your daily life is embroiled into pseudo-musical or non-musical activities. An hour would be great, but five minutes is better than nothing. Recognize that pseudo-musical activities (writing, teaching, studying, copying parts….) are not the same as making music, even though they might be delightful experiences in their own right. We need to be constantly warmed by that real core energy of musical spirit.

Commercial success and even inter-human communication are secondary to being warmed by the fire of creativity. Consider it a life imperative to touch the real thing. See progress over weeks, months, and years, not over the course of a few minutes.

If this rings true to you, please stop surfing the ’net, and create music for five minutes RIGHT NOW. Close your door, then play your guitar, beat your drum, improvise, scat sing, write a lyric—whatever the real-deal-essence-of-what-music-is-all-about-closest-to-center activity is for you. Then schedule a time when you will do it again tomorrow, and repeat. Just five minutes.

Let me know how it goes.

In grammar and style guides, a tremendous amount of ink has been devoted to the topic of when to use words and when to use numerals. Many book publishers, including Berklee Press, use the Chicago Manual of Style as their guide for such things. Although CMS makes a valiant attempt at clarifying this topic, the needs of music writing are very specific, and other resources have been necessary in our quest towards clarity and consistency with this.

I found that the most helpful resources are ones devoted to the most technical forms of scientific writing. Fun reading, let me tell you. In this post, I will share some of the insights I’ve gained about when to use numerals and when to use words.

A guiding principle, though, is this: Numerals are different than words, and they are an interruption to the reader’s general flow. They can be a great help in clarifying comparisons and names, but they should be used thoughtfully because there is the danger that they can become annoying.

As with all matters of writing, clarity is key.

The CMS general rule is to write out all whole numbers from –100 to 100. A-hah, you say! You should have written “minus one hundred to one hundred.” Well, I wish I could have, but when quantities are set in close proximity, as in a range, it’s clearer to use numerals.

See the game?

Here’s a sentence that took a ton of research to construct, the process of which was extremely helpful to me in understanding how to render numerals.

1. “A 12-bar blues has three 4-bar phrases.”

[applause, please…]

Here, we have two types of quantities: types of musical constructions (12-bar, 4-bar) and a quantity of objects of these types (three). It’s clearer to have a distinction in how these differing logical organizations are rendered. Compare that above sentence to the alternatives:

2. “A twelve-bar blues has three four-bar phrases.”

3. “A 12-bar blues has 3 4-bar phrases.”

The eye has to puzzle out examples (2) and (3) in a way that it doesn’t have to puzzle out (1). Example (3) is particularly difficult, figuring out the 3 and 4. It’s an example of a numeral being annoying and disruptive rather than clarifying.

By the way, I set parentheses around example numerals because I don’t want to confuse the other numerals with my example numerals. So, each type of number gets a unique treatment, and reading comprehension is served, hopefully.

This gets hairy, hairy, hairy. One of the most difficult types of writing to do is writing about music theory for guitar, as in Jon Damian’s recent book, The Chord Factory. Why? Because there are a great many types of numbers involved. You’ve got:

String numbers
Fret numbers
Finger numbers
Interval numbers
Chord extension numbers
Scale tone numbers

With your first finger on the 1st fret of the 6th string and your third finger on the 3rd fret of the 4th string, play a fifth from the root, and then imagine the C9 accompaniment….

[more applause, please….]

It’s quite murderous, tracking these over hundreds of pages (not to mention, hundreds of books).

Beyond just specifying rule after rule, there are a couple principles that I find helpful to keep in mind.

1. If something is identified or categorized by its number, then use the numeral (or “ordinal” form of the numeral, e.g., 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). 16-track unit, 1st fret, fret 1, page 6. Cmin7(9)

2. If there are two different types of numbers that are likely to be discussed in close proximity to each other, see if there is a logical way to make them different, even if it forces you to violate some “rules.” “Put your first finger on the 1st fret.” Or, rework: Put your 1st finger on fret 1.”

3. If you are comparing more than two quantities, use numerals. I have 2, you have 6, and she has all 9.” That’s an example of numerals being clarifying.

It is a great challenge to make sure that these are stylistically consistent at the book and catalog level, and this is where lists of rules can be helpful. Again, though, you sometimes need to violate the rules to achieve clarity.

Here are the “rules” listed in the Berklee Press Style Guide, which have a specific slant towards music writing and are thus supplementary to CMS. Unfortunately, this list seems to be ever expanding. I think it was originally compiled by Susan Gedutis Lindsay.

Words

Whole numbers (zero to one hundred, including negative numbers)

Numbers that begin a sentence (Three thousand fifty-five people…)

Intervals (Play both notes of the minor third in measure 3.)

Also note: In labels in musical examples, intervals are abbreviated using the numeral and its quality. M (major), m (minor), and P (perfect), as in M7, m3, P5.

Note values up to sixteenths (whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, but 32nd note, 64th note, etc.)

Beat quantities (A half note lasts for two beats.)

Measure quantities (Vamp for sixteen bars.)

Inversions (first inversion)

Finger number (Third finger)

Numerals

Numbers with decimals and fractions (1.56, 2 1/2)

Measure numbers (measures 3–11)

Item names where numbers are important (16-track recorder, 12-bar blues)

Model numbers (DX-7, Hammond B3 organ)

Money ($25)

Note values larger than a sixteenth note (32nd note)

Beat numbers (beats 2 and 4)

Scale degrees (Degree 4 of C major is F.)

Chord degrees (A major triad has a major 3rd.)

Chord numbers (Substitute VI for II at the coda.)

Metronome markings (Set the quarter note to 88 bpm.)

String number (First finger on the 3rd string.)

Fret or position (7th fret or fret 7)

Time signatures (4/4)

Forms (12-bar blues)

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