Day One
As you might guess from the Home Page, two of my primary interests are music and science. While it’s not so hard for me to write something about a science topic or the unfortunate state of science education in the USA today, writing about music is another, more difficult, matter. Composers write music because words are inadequate or inappropriate to communicate their thoughts, so writing words about music is often futile or, about as often, presumptuous.
I am frequently reminded by program notes that there are precious few living composers who explain their work well. Some will tell the listener that their music cures various of mankind’s emotional or physical ills or explains mathematical quandaries or is a guide to the moral universe or evokes profound spiritual insight or answers Douglas Adams’s question once and for all. Other composers provide musical jargon about style, content, and form that is as meaningless to today’s concert goer as is the most obtuse of scientific jargon.
As a composer of modest talent, I don’t aspire to the former explanations, and I usually understand the futility of the latter. I do understand what I like and don’t like in music. I will try to explain what I like and why I like it, and I will try not to preach on what I don’t like – that should be obvious enough from my music.
My music is generally lyrical and melody centered. By melody I mean what the person in the street would recognize as a “tune,” even though that tune has to be flexible enough for development, expansion, contraction, transformation, and exploration. When done well, my melodies are memorable and singable, at least with one’s inner ear. My melodies usually fit their harmonies rather than fight against them. Composers often speak of motives, short portions of melodies, and I like playing with motives. Typical concert goers will hear any piece of my music one time: I hope that they’ll carry away a bit of melody to enjoy at a later date.
My music uses mostly standard triads, chords based on thirds, that are usually the same chords as one hears in popular music, traditional church music, and folk songs, and most concert music through the first three quarters or so of the 19th century. Sometimes I use these chords in different, non-traditional, ways, and sometimes I add tones within or extra thirds atop the basic triad. When my music goes beyond basic triads into more complex harmonies or passages with uncertain tonal foundations, the context usually prepares the listener. Sections of prolonged dissonance are almost always set at a tolerable level that ultimately finds a consonant resolution or ends up disguising the dissonance. Rarely do I use dissonance for its shock value—rarely, not never!
I sometimes wish that my music was more rhythmically driven, but it is seldom so—I try to improve. I think that my use of rhythm maintains the listener’s interest and moves the music forward. Instances do exist for toe tapping and head nodding, and syncopation and other off-accent devices sometimes catch listeners by surprise. I have never understood the phrase “tyranny of the bar line.” If regular rhythms become boring or bothersome, that’s what mixed time signatures are for. Otherwise, a regularity of meter can create a mood of ritual and incantation, being more primal and magical than tyrannical..
