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Laurent de La Hyre, Allegory of Music (1649)

Before a concert, the orchestra tunes. The oboist blows a sustained reference pitch at A 440 Hz to which the string, woodwind, and brass players adjust. The musicians tune their instruments to compensate for environmental changes in temperature and humidity. Before the music has even begun, each of the tuned orchestra’s sections are ready to harmoniously blend.

Like the orchestra’s instrumentalists adjusting their string tensions and embouchures, the composer tunes himself. But this tuning doesn’t happen before composing. Composing itself is a tuning process.

What do I mean by this? Composing is discovering how a musical part can live over time, as well as working out how multiple parts or textures can interact. But at the same time the composer is devising patterns and possibilities in sounds outside himself, he’s adjusting internally to their shapes, feelings, and implications. There’s a subliminal dialogue happening between the music maker the musical thing being made.

The composer’s adjusting begins as a kind of resonating-along-with the sounds. This adjusting is especially acute in electronic music production, where one constantly encounters novel timbres. Say, for example, you’re working with a grainy string sound with lots of little lo-fi drop outs built into it. As you play with the sound, trying to figure out a part, your ear alights onto this grainy sound’s mysterious texture. It’s enchanting and you want to know why. You’re trying to understand what makes the sound beautiful–how, for example, its noise component is so suggestive of missing information. Composing as ventriloquism: as you play, you imagine that you are the sound—as if the sound is a stand-in for your voice, speaking on your behalf.

But the longer you play with the sound—remember you’re still figuring out what to do with it, improvising little melodies and chord adventures—the more the sound begins doing its work on you. How sound works in this way as an environmental change that impacts our psyches is one of music’s most potent powers. As you play with the sound it feels as if it’s re-aligning your nervous system. Sound slows us down, deepens what we’re feeling. It triggers ideas, memories, and even altered states. As Ken Hyder notes in How To Know, a book about drumming and shamanism, “getting information through light trance is a complex kind of transmission.”

So when it feels like sounds are re-aligning you and composing is becoming a state of conscious reverie, pay attention. The music worth doing is always doing something to us. When music tunes you to new frequencies, that’s something to build on.