Saturday, November 19, 2011

G+ Digest

Below are blurbs I've written on music since joining Google+, starting with the oldest.

Listen to the second movement of this composition by Heinrich Biber. That's a seventeenth century song! I don't know much about Biber, but there is maybe a clue in the movement's title: "Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerey Humor." This has to be an effort towards comedy, but how strange that it stands within an overall work and not alone. My guess is that it's in the same vein of Mozart's "A Musical Joke", only with the joke solely being the poor performance (Mozart's composition is a sarcastic critique of banal musical ideas and mediocre technical ability; it was also a possible indirect critique of his father who prized monetary success over creativity).


Song off of The Diogenes Club's last EP, "Versailles." The Diogenes Club is a duo whose output has been, easily, among my most adored EDM (nope, not using the IDM label) of the past couple years. It wasn't until the music video for the EP's track of the same name that I realized that the duo, maybe, were trying to communicate a blurred current of "retro" sheen, possibly based in the late 70s/early 80s. Whatever the intended connections, The Diogenes Club's music, for me, is about a steady decomposition linked to autumn. I don't understand the specifics of this yet, but I do think that the largest general contributor is the songs' pervasive sense of nostalgia, chilled and stretched to a breathy thinness. Things are in a constant state of fading, clothed by dewy accumulation, with the fuzzed-up pads, the earthily fragrant chords, and singer Paul Giles' yearning, echoing vocals. On the note of vocals, I should just say outright that I often have a hard time understanding the lyrics, both in terms of actually comprehending the words and the then-perceived phrases. This isn't a complaint, though: Giles' voice is an incredibly rare case of one that is sensually pleasing to me, located in a kind of "melodic talking" that is controlled, plain, and muted. It's at home as a purely sonic portion.


A track for Mr. Collier's dungeon crawler that (I think) I put the finishing touches on tonight. It's intended to accompany one of the game's environments, all of which are in a tower, barring the nearby town. At this point, I've made more environmental tracks for the game than are needed, so . . . I'm not sure why I'm still making them. The quick bunch of chords and the couple bass notes preceding the loop were included today for what I think is a better anticipation of the original key. Although I'm not sure what conclusive stance to take (if I should even take one) when it comes to the last moments of a song that's meant to loop; should it prepare the listener for that tonal return? -- or is it all right if the song travels to different places and makes no effort to rectify that change? The latter probably tends to draw attention to the song as an isolated body, which might be unwanted when the song will be heard dozens of times in a row by players. The ends of songs that I've made for this soundtrack have been fun and frustrating to approach. Due to the songs' frequent modulations, things can get pretty harmonically distant from the beginning. This presents a challenge which has granted me some of the most personally surprising and exciting compositional moments of this project. The goal is to figure out a flow of musical "leaps of faith" that won't ask too much of the listener's perceptive logic. Granted, logic varies from person to person.


Have you ever thought about the strangeness of saying something like, "Turn the volume up/down," in reference to a song? "Volume" is really a reference to spatial occupancy, but this is the term that English-speakers have adopted for the loudness of music. According to David Huron in his book, Sweet Anticipation, the "volume" label below the knobs of sound equipment is related to the proposal by psychologist Smith Stevens that volume (the sense of auditory size/mass/spaciousness) is a basic attribute of sound. Writes Huron, "Equipment manufacturers thought that 'volume' would appeal to customers more than either 'loudness' or 'amplitude.'"
On a slightly related note, I think it's interesting how the communicative properties of animals' sounds are paralleled in our emotional comprehension of music. Essentially, the (hypothetical) idea is that the acoustic connotations of language predict our understanding of -- and perhaps compositional habits in -- music. Again, from Huron's book: "Loud sounds are generally associated with high arousal in a vast array of animals. Low-pitched loud sounds are associated with aggression, whereas high-pitched loud sounds are associated with alarm. High-pitched quiet sounds are often associated with deference or submissiveness, while low-pitched quiet sounds are associated with both contentment and threat."


Finished this song about a month ago, but, having just been reunited with my speaker system after a year of separation, I realized that the kick drum was too loud. So I tweaked that -- and here's the final version. As usual, the germinative element for this song was an establishing of personal harmonic interest and proceeding exploration of what subsequent routes -- either self-directed or, to put it one way, "uncontrolled" -- may be taken. It might be said that this approach, or ideal, is a search for paradox: that one will improve and understand oneself better musically while hoping for the results to outpace personal logic/anticipation in little and/or large ways. I won't go through with finishing a song if I cannot lose sight of my own hand at a sufficient numbers of points (the points being context sensitive). The bassline's sequence starting at 1:31 and ending on 1:43 is an interesting example of a compositional phenomenon that's happened to me a few times before, where -- through a combination of what's initially there -- a kind of musical gestalt takes shape, so vague that I need to take hold of it that instant and follow it through; and when it's done I know, somehow, that it is a "correct" vocalization of that imaginative ephemera. These events may be categorized as a kind of comprehended déjà vu, where the musical idea almost seems to exist a priori and simply needs to be drawn out in a timely way. It is possible, however, that the process of actualization strips something out of the original conception -- like the memory of a dream, forever lost if not written down upon the moment of awakening -- through the concentrative act's necessity of, in some cases, significantly elapsed time. What startled me most? The small (in terms of measure-body) tonic shift at 1:15. Still am so happy with it.


When walking home last night and thinking (a choice pastime tbh), I got to considering harmonic behavior and what it can symbolize. I also thought about the musical ownership -- how a composer can harness an aural shape or action and adopt it as a personalized expression the same way a painter may use a color or a poet a word. Earlier in the day I'd been listening to a song of Kazumi Watanabe's, "Concrete Cow," and had posed to myself the pretty naive question of "How could anyone not like this?" Instead of making me go into an imagined argument with a detractor, the question caused me to wonder what I was finding valuable. This internal conversation played back into my thoughts during my walk as I segued from Watanabe to my music, particularly the pre-melodic beginning of "Gray Morning," which is a chordal cycle with a cadential tonic twist. It's probably accurate to say that my foundation for composition lies in EDM, because 1) it was what I was listening to the most when I began making music, and, 2) all these years later, many of my ideas still come out first as a fairly clean four-chord sequence. What has also been consistent is how I have, almost from the start of composing, often concluded these sequences with, to use the word again, a twist. I've grown hesitant of using personal metaphoric terms -- stiff, handy Labels -- for music (for reasons I'll explain another time (or in the comments section, if anyone cares)), but last night I modified "twist" to be "epiphany." I think this is more interesting because not only do I find a twist tied to gimmickry -- to me, an epiphany connotes discovery, and an implicit acknowledgment that the revealed thing already existed. The discovery is simply the fact of its unearthing and the discoverer's rationale. This puts the discoverer in the role of logic-body who grants life and/or comprehensibility to an "object." It also more accurately describes the pleasure I find in "Gray Morning"'s opener or parts of "Concrete Cow," where I get the sensation that I'm witnessing an achieved understanding both in the mind of the composer and the music itself. My immediate mental image for this is a geometric form that's been rotated to reveal that it is not at all in the shape one thought it held. I realize that this is a pretty romantic and antiquated notion (daemons), but the more I think about it, the more I'm seeing it as mineable in theoretical metaphor.


Completed a couple months ago, but uploaded to YouTube yesterday.
I'm happy with this song particularly for its lyricism. I use "lyricism" here as a melodic state that, in one way or another, seems to hold an ineffable linguistic shape. This, in turn, makes the song into a dialogue, a narrative, or a non-physical performance that somehow -- barring the very beginning -- is a continual response to preceding content. I thought it would be interesting to write down, however abstract and perhaps incomprehensible, my temporal associations with this song's sections. I imagine that if I did this every week the results would vary.

00:00 -- Bizarre. A rolling that goes back and forth. Slim, sharp edges. An alternate way out.
00:16 -- "This is how it is." Time. An explanation. Almost didactic.
00:31 -- Something on the side, pushed in between two vertical planes. Ghostly emergence. "But don't forget -- there is this, too."
00:47 -- Rewinding. Bodies climbing. Gets explanatory again. Soberness at the root.
01:03 -- Elevation. "On the other hand." Swift, jolly admittance of mistakes. It's really okay.
01:19 -- "Oh, and on that note -- " Good-natured. Impending reversion.
01:27 -- "Naturally. Still, it should -- must -- be considered." Dangerously close to a binary assertion.
01:35 -- Can be held in the hand. "But don't you see?" Pluckable.
01:43 -- A trick. Diagonal and compact. Shift. Very light green.
01:51 -- Humble tapestry. Measured, numerical commentary. Everything has been cleared away. Centered.
01:59 -- Feigned but believable reconsideration. Dry. "All of us. Even you." Reality.