Music and Pleasure in the decision making process for composition
Endorphins make the result
One of the things that I have noticed when people review music is that they frequently refer to the number of iterations in relationship to hook, melody, section or chorus etc. They say “This should be repeated more”, but more often they say “It is repetitious, boring and played too often.” This can be correct but it can frequently be woefully wrong. Sometimes a person is not familiar with the genre and does not get much out of the hook and thus it will be very boring to them quickly. Another person might love the genre and will have brain-mapped the musical material and is now functioning in the sub-conscious level in regards to the piece of music. Take for instance the Rolling Stones song tumbling dice. At the end they slowly work the hook gradually adding their female chorus and expanding the good feeling. Most Stones fans would say that they were correct in repeating the hook as much as they did. A person that was not moved by it might say that they should cut it shorter. In Richard Wagner’s funeral march at the end he pounds away at his dominant cadence over and over. He was a master and knew that it was working in a big way and he showed the insight of milking it for all that it was worth. His endorphin system told him how long to do it, not some left brain algorithm. When writing, it is best to let your mind tell you what is enough and what is too much not what a person that is not “getting it” thinks. All of the great writers used their endorphin flow dictate much of what they did. If you wrote music like a math equation rather than feeling it you would get mechanical music. (And that is not always bad either depending on the context and how it fits into the big picture according to your endorphin flow.
Many other factors are like this in music, that is, context driven. That is why a song or movement will elicit love and hate from a broad spectrum of listeners. I have always said that I am more interested in what someone loves in music than what they hate. What they hate might be bad or more likely they are just not connected to its wave length so to speak. Stravinsky once said that whenever he heard a bad piece of music it was always Villa-Lobos. It is very humorous to here but what would really be a hoot would be to hear what it was that Stravinsky thought was great music, what pieces he thought were profound and endorphin loaded. Some of the brilliant people at the University directed me to what they thought were the great pieces of music. I never regretted one of them, once brain-mapped they paid off spectacularly. The universal music lover takes a lot longer in time to run out of material, I like to know what is good in every type of music.
I recently went to a studio and had the people there mix the songs. They introduced me to a roving mixer and the young man sat down and discussed mixing while doing it. I did not have the spare funds to mix all of the songs I wanted and we devoted about 30 to 40 minutes per song that we worked on. Many of these mixes were put up on GarageBand.com. They were much better than what was done before but because the amount of time allowed was so small they were ultimately not usable as final mixes. But all was not wasted. What I learned from the engineer was quite a bit and from that I figured out how to do the mixing myself. This jump started me in a big way and was the second big boost to my musical energies which had been virtually destroyed due to depressing events a while back. The first big lift was just working with GarageBand.com and the experience brought me out of a shell that had made compositional work or most musical work very small and inconsequential. While it was a bit sparse at times, the input about my offered musical creations helped inspire a new wave of energy. Many people expressed positive feelings about the music which was helpful. Many others gave good advice about technical matters that were interfering with realization of the music’s potential. While I had always worked hard at compositional measures many aspects of recording and mixing remained a mystery that was being filled in one piece at a time. This year has been a good one for my growth in this area. Thus I have remixed the CD called “The Tunnel” officially for the first time and expect it to be available at site called CD-Baby soon. Work is proceeding on other CDs for release and hopefully we can get 27 of them finished before moving on to finish the current crop of projects that are in pipeline. Budgeting for Orchestra would make a lot of other things possible as well.
Good luck to all of you and hope you will consider getting a copy of THE TUNNEL at CD-baby.
Steve Kusaba
One of the things that I have noticed when people review music is that they frequently refer to the number of iterations in relationship to hook, melody, section or chorus etc. They say “This should be repeated more”, but more often they say “It is repetitious, boring and played too often.” This can be correct but it can frequently be woefully wrong. Sometimes a person is not familiar with the genre and does not get much out of the hook and thus it will be very boring to them quickly. Another person might love the genre and will have brain-mapped the musical material and is now functioning in the sub-conscious level in regards to the piece of music. Take for instance the Rolling Stones song tumbling dice. At the end they slowly work the hook gradually adding their female chorus and expanding the good feeling. Most Stones fans would say that they were correct in repeating the hook as much as they did. A person that was not moved by it might say that they should cut it shorter. In Richard Wagner’s funeral march at the end he pounds away at his dominant cadence over and over. He was a master and knew that it was working in a big way and he showed the insight of milking it for all that it was worth. His endorphin system told him how long to do it, not some left brain algorithm. When writing, it is best to let your mind tell you what is enough and what is too much not what a person that is not “getting it” thinks. All of the great writers used their endorphin flow dictate much of what they did. If you wrote music like a math equation rather than feeling it you would get mechanical music. (And that is not always bad either depending on the context and how it fits into the big picture according to your endorphin flow.
Many other factors are like this in music, that is, context driven. That is why a song or movement will elicit love and hate from a broad spectrum of listeners. I have always said that I am more interested in what someone loves in music than what they hate. What they hate might be bad or more likely they are just not connected to its wave length so to speak. Stravinsky once said that whenever he heard a bad piece of music it was always Villa-Lobos. It is very humorous to here but what would really be a hoot would be to hear what it was that Stravinsky thought was great music, what pieces he thought were profound and endorphin loaded. Some of the brilliant people at the University directed me to what they thought were the great pieces of music. I never regretted one of them, once brain-mapped they paid off spectacularly. The universal music lover takes a lot longer in time to run out of material, I like to know what is good in every type of music.
I recently went to a studio and had the people there mix the songs. They introduced me to a roving mixer and the young man sat down and discussed mixing while doing it. I did not have the spare funds to mix all of the songs I wanted and we devoted about 30 to 40 minutes per song that we worked on. Many of these mixes were put up on GarageBand.com. They were much better than what was done before but because the amount of time allowed was so small they were ultimately not usable as final mixes. But all was not wasted. What I learned from the engineer was quite a bit and from that I figured out how to do the mixing myself. This jump started me in a big way and was the second big boost to my musical energies which had been virtually destroyed due to depressing events a while back. The first big lift was just working with GarageBand.com and the experience brought me out of a shell that had made compositional work or most musical work very small and inconsequential. While it was a bit sparse at times, the input about my offered musical creations helped inspire a new wave of energy. Many people expressed positive feelings about the music which was helpful. Many others gave good advice about technical matters that were interfering with realization of the music’s potential. While I had always worked hard at compositional measures many aspects of recording and mixing remained a mystery that was being filled in one piece at a time. This year has been a good one for my growth in this area. Thus I have remixed the CD called “The Tunnel” officially for the first time and expect it to be available at site called CD-Baby soon. Work is proceeding on other CDs for release and hopefully we can get 27 of them finished before moving on to finish the current crop of projects that are in pipeline. Budgeting for Orchestra would make a lot of other things possible as well.
Good luck to all of you and hope you will consider getting a copy of THE TUNNEL at CD-baby.
Steve Kusaba
posted by Steve Kusaba | 3:34 PM
|
0 comments
