brettworks

Does composing music happen at a precise moment? Is it when you have a concept for a piece? When a looping rhythm comes alive? When you alight on a chord progression that does something new? When a technology generates a beautiful error? When an improvisation opens up a world? Or when an orchestration of parts sounds inevitable? Composing happens at all of these moments, but isn’t limited to any one of them. It’s more a cumulative process, a building over time, a function of both serendipity and intention. Ideally, composing has no formula.

So let’s reformulate the question. If composing has neither a precise moment of happening nor a formula, does it have a prime mover? For me it begins with a hmm, a noticing something’s happening with a sound and responding to this with a sense of urgency. Noticing turns into paying attention to what sounds extraordinary and the small things that make it so. (An extraordinary sound often contains meaningful differences and therefore, information. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, information is any difference that makes a difference.) Once a sound has my attention, a sense of urgency kicks in. Go all in with what this sound is offering, it says, and build on it. More broadly, urgency is a sensitivity to fleeting ideas that suddenly self-assemble like a murmuration of starlings, and then vanish.

In sum, it’s by transforming what they notice right now into a musical structure that a composer celebrates the limits of time and attention. This is why composing is an artistic response to a feeling of scarcity.