brettworks

You’re a soloist who specializes in 19th-century Romantic music. You have no sheet music in front of you and don’t consider yourself an improviser, yet at your instrument you’re able to remember fragments of themes, chord progressions, and melodies from dozens of different composers whose works you’ve practiced and performed. Use this partial knowledge to improvise something of your own.

You’re a music production template in a DAW trying to decide which instruments and presets to include. The musician you work for likes acoustic-sounding sounds or otherworldly synthetic-sounding sounds, but very little in between. She wants to be able to work quickly, but also likes serendipitous surprises. Don’t let her down: design a template for her and explain how it could evolve over time.

You’re a band trying to compose something new with the same old instrumentation. Figure out ways of thinking about instruments and instrumentality that will inspire yourselves to pursue unusual music.

You’re a music critic trying to find an objective measure by which assess what makes an artist’s or musical idiom’s sound compelling and worth writing about. Explain in precise terms (1) what you’re listening for and why, and (2) how the music builds trust.

You’re a musical style who has found itself done to death–you’re all clichéd out. Explain what you know of your own history and what your favorite practitioners achieved by way of your conventions that was significant. Also, what style would you most like to grow into one day?

You’re a music teacher tasked with transmitting your expert tacit knowledge to a student. The only problem is you can’t demonstrate anything at an instrument; you can only listen, gesture, and make suggestions. Explain the strategies you would use to transmit your musical knowledge.

You’re a historian from the distant future looking back at the totality of the world’s music making, spanning the years 800 BCE to 2026 BCE (give or take a few years). With your skills of compression, generalization, and connection, write a non-chronological narrative for a curious reader that explores this musical history through the themes of invention, problem-solving, and technology. Your examples can include anything and everything–from ancient Greek lyres to Renaissance polyphony, from hip hop to raga and maqam, from singing bowls to synthesizers.