brettworks

The composer John Cage once said that the problem with improvising is that musicians only play what they know and therefore “don’t arrive at any revelation that they’re unaware of.” But improvising always reveals what the musician was unaware of; in fact, that’s its power. We want to hear the surprises that fleetingly illuminate, like fireflies, the tacit knowledge the improvisor didn’t know she had.

Classic minimalism reveals repetition’s powers and pitfalls. The power of repetition comes from perceptual artifacts such as inherent rhythms, metrical ambiguities, and hypnotic effects that arise as trompe l’oreille by-products of how we hear the looping groove of short patterns. The pitfall of repetition is that its stasis can work against the sense of its melodies and harmonies going somewhere.

The enchantment of music software (instruments, processing effects, DAWs) comes from a collaboration between you and the hundreds of programmers and musicians who designed the tools you’re using. Recalling Brian Eno’s term scenius, which describes “the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene,” a producer’s composing similarly has many contributors.

The benefit of limiting one’s sounds to just a few is that it frees you to focus on writing interesting parts for them.

Composing is your best chance to make the music you’ve been listening for, but haven’t yet heard.