brettworks

(Painting: Fernand Khnopff, “Listening to Schumann” [1883])

Composers who write for acoustic musicians have a good idea of the soundworld they’re scoring for: an orchestra, a wind quartet, a choir, a percussion ensemble. But this isn’t the case with music producers as they create both a palette of sounds and the virtual acoustic/synthetic spaces these sounds inhabit. So there’s a conundrum at the heart of music production practice in that you don’t necessarily know what sounds you’ll work with until you hear them, and you don’t hear them until you accidentally discover them or deliberately make them. This conundrum can be averted by writing for the same timbre palette each time, but doing forecloses the adventure of not knowing what you’re listening for until you hear it. Instead, embrace the conundrum by building music around the beguiling, around sounds compelling enough to suggest a direction to head towards, a world to inhabit, a feeling to keep alive for a while.