composition
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Compositional Principles
Capturing a live performance is worth more than re-playing a sample. A clear process of making results in a clear experience of listening. Have the music sounding coherent at each stage of its crafting. Seek sounds compelling on their own. Pay attention to those (fleeting) moments the music takes you outside of itself. How did Continue reading
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Musical Lines
Translate the sense of indecision the composer feels when beginning you’ll recognize that no place sounds like the right way to start so how to know that chosen options will set a tuneful path paved by intentions not random timbres that if we begin here we won’t box ourselves in like notes on the stave a cage Continue reading
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Wont’s And Wills: Notes On Composing
You will have to chose right now, right this very moment. You won’t go back. You won’t judge it positively or negatively. You won’t wonder, What if I had done something else? You won’t worry how it relates to anything. You won’t worry that it sounds too simple or too complicated. You won’t speculate on Continue reading
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On Jon Hopkins At Brooklyn Steel
I recently went to hear Jon Hopkins perform at Brooklyn Steel, a shoebox-shaped warehouse located on the lonely north edge of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I only caught the end of the performance, but what I saw was stellar. Hopkins played music from his latest release, Singularity, an album which aims to recreate, in a sort of Continue reading
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On Key Moments In Composing
Each time you sit down at the computer and the keyboard to compose it feels as if you have no prior experience to draw on. Even though all your conscious knowing tells you that this can’t be the case, you’re beginning as if from scratch, facing the empty screen without being able recall the hundreds Continue reading
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On The Ergonomics Of Music: Reflections On Flow In Steve Reich’s “Drumming”
“But how the paths sounded to me was deeply linked to how I was making them. There wasn’t one me listening, and another one playing along paths. I listened-in-order-to-make-my-way.” -David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand (MIT Press 2001, p. 40) Every once in a while warming up before a show I noodle around by playing Continue reading
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On How Composers Listen To Their Own Work
Having recently finished a project and waiting for it to be mastered, I found myself spending a few minutes each day listening to the pieces. I did this listening while doing other things like making toast or tidying up the apartment, and more often than not I listened from another room, letting the sounds move Continue reading
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On Composing At 40,000 Feet: Afrojack And The Soaring Economics Of EDM
In a recent New Yorker article, Josh Eells describes the economics of the electronic dance music (EDM) scene in Las Vegas. Here, working at gambling resort clubs, marquee-name DJs (Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, David Guetta, Diplo, Deadmau5, Afrojack, and others) are paid mind-boggling sums to perform their sets for big spending and very drunk audiences. Increasingly, Continue reading
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