brettworks

Photo Credit: Fragments from The Tithonus poem by Sappho (630-580 BC), about a singer who will lose her beauty as she ages but retain her musical abilities.

• Quickly commit then slowly edit. I spend little time finding a sound, but a lot of time finessing it into a more interesting version of itself. Altering a sound that already exists is like solving a small problem whose constraints are a few parameters in front of you to play with. The key is recognizing when a sound is close enough that you can finesse it the rest of the way towards interestingness.

• Perpetual Present. Starting a new piece each day is, at minimum, an invitation to discover a new sound, happen upon a new approach, and have the feeling that this is my new favorite piece. If starting feels daunting, play a single tone and record it. Sometimes I build music over a single tone and then remove the tone, or I derive the music’s key from it, or realize that wait, this tone is the piece.

• Agility is inspiring. Reducing my template to one instrument slashed the laptop’s project loading time from one minute to three seconds. A minimalist template is also a fascinating constraint: since you don’t see a hundred instruments, you imagine making a smaller world with just this one.

• everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest (W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, p.16). Some composing techniques are more reliably generative than others. For me, improvising a part is decision-making in movement-going with where the hands want to go and moving along with how they move. Improvising introduces interesting inconsistencies, hesitations, and mistakes that often become meaningful details shaping the music’s form. Performance will not be quantized!