The title sums up what we're about to see here really. Let's go through those three items one at a time, yeah?
First: Well, I'm back. Not entirely sure why I left, other than the usual "work constantly on new project then burnout and fall into apathy" creative cycle. That was... a pretty short item. Moving on.
Second: Change of direction! In hindsight the old direction was really quite strange. On one hand, I'd like to think that it was a somewhat interesting way to expose people to certain forms of music and examine them at a fairly basic level. On the other hand, you could sift through wikipedia for an afternoon with a youtube tab open and glean roughly as much information, if not more. So we're probably not going to do that anymore.
What will we do? Well, you'll sit there and read this or whatever. I'll still drone on and on about mostly music, but this time I'll be talking about my own music. More specifically, I'd like to talk about how I approach music, the methods and techniques of composition that have become my bread and butter... that sort of thing. Is this narcissistic? Yeah. Is this interesting? Maybe to someone, but probably not very much so. However, it isn't something you could have googled beforehand and that is a good enough reason to convince myself to do this.
So that's the music aspect. The philosophy stuff will be the same, which is to say that it will probably be somewhat rare. The board gaming stuff... will happen. Honestly, I have some ideas for that too (Amusingly, maybe, one such idea will be a hybrid music/board gaming post. Isn't that exciting?). I'm trying not to plan too far ahead though, just to keep things feeling manageable enough to not jump ship.
Third: I'm going to ramble about music.
So, this is mostly going to be about how I approach music for the foreseeable future, right? Now it turns out that some of that might get... weird, depending on how much prior interest you've developed in theory and philosophy of music. What this means is that before anything else I should probably define what "music" actually is and what follows from that in my opinion, otherwise everything that follows will be complete gibberish.
Note from the future: These are the only two sentences I've gone back and added after finishing the rest of the post. Prepare for some stream of consciousness blather with serious structure issues.
Before I move on, I need to stress that even if you disagree on one or more points raised here, the important thing (at least in the context of this blog, obviously you can assign importance as deemed fit) is to gain an understanding of where the next few posts are coming from conceptually.
Alright.
What is music? Music is any instance of sound that someone somewhere has said, "hey, that's music" about. Let's flesh that out a bit. Music is sound, that much should be easy to agree on, but what about that second part? Someone just has to consider something music for it to be music? Isn't that a bit arbitrary?
Yes.
The classification of music is arbitrary, because music is nothing more than a concept, an idea. It isn't the sound, it's the way humans have, or at least a human has, decided to assign meaning to that sound. We will come back to that later, but it works for now. What this does mean though is that the world of music is suddenly very, very large, which is something some people may have a problem with. However, there doesn't seem to be another good way to define the art form. One decent definition clarified it as "organized sound" but that has problems with either not including things which should be included or being just as open-ended as before. For example, how "organized" does something have to be? Does jazz improvisation count? How about a guy playing around with guitar feedback? Field recordings? 4'33? Each gets progressively "less" organized yet there doesn't appear to be a clear breaking point as to where something ceases to have enough structure, at least none that would be supported by anything other than throwing your arms up in the air. So really, you might as well just go with the earlier definition since it cuts right to the point.
Music is sound that someone calls music.
That's the first of three concepts I need to get out here. I'll try to be less rambly for the next two but no promises. Anyways, what we've got is people calling music music, but why are they doing that? Where does meaning enter the picture and how does it interact with the physical aspect of sound? It is commonly held that music expresses meaning, or at least good music does. Hold that thought.
Pick a sound found in the music you listen to that you like. It could be anything, the sound of an electric guitar playing a power chord, the sound of a snare hitting on 2 and 4, the sound of a vibraslap on fire. Why do you like that sound?
See, music is all about cool sounds. Like, seriously, man. You find a sound that you think works, for whatever reason, and you go "yeah, that's in the song now." It may not be something that's necessarily new either, if you really like the sound of basic chords strummed on an acoustic guitar then there's a good chance you might work that into quite a bit of your material. Note that there's nothing inherently more "music-y" about that acoustic guitar strumming compared to throwing a hammer at a wall, it's just a cool sound that works.
So bringing meaning back into this, there is a horrible, horrible widespread misconception that "cool sound-ism" and "expressing meaning-ism" are fundamentally opposed schools of thought. If you spend too much time tweaking the effects you're slathering that cello in, you're spending too much time with a calculator working out the timing on that polytempo section, you're spending too much time throwing darts at a dictionary to come up with lyrics, you clearly aren't investing any REAL MEANING into your craft. I mean, obviously, right? Sadness can only be expressed sonically through minor triads on a piano while some dude sings about a girl that strangely seems to always be either completely anonymous or interchangeable with nearly any other girl. That's just the way it works, because music.
Or maybe, if you'd recall the paragraph before that last one in which we talked about sounds, you'll realize that those sounds don't actually have any connection to those meanings. Think about that. The sound that has made you feel a certain way your entire life is absolutely unrelated to that emotion in any objective sense. But it seems blindly obvious when you think about it, right? There's no reason that a note with another note three semitones above it and a third four semitones above that one (all assuming Western 12-tone equal temperment as the scale) should mean "sad" or "serious," that's a subjective response on your end. You felt that about the music, the music didn't put it into you.
"But wait," you object, "that musician probably did intend to express sadness with those chords that made me feel that way! Doesn't that count for anything?" No, not really. Alright, it's very, very likely that the vast majority of people pull the vast majority of their subjective response to music from their environment, so it makes perfect sense that two people from the same environment might feel roughly the same way about a certain way of organizing sound, such that if one of them writes a song intending it to express a certain meaning the other would be able to extract that meaning from the song accurately. It is very important to realize that these are two unrelated subjective experiences that just happen to coincide, the sound itself did nothing to transport it.
So if the sounds have no inherent connection to the intended meaning what's stopping someone from just using any sounds to express anything they might want? Uh, nothing. That's the whole point. The composer can decide to express any meaning through whatever variety of "cool sounds-ism" strikes their fancy that day and it will result in a meaningful song. Will you necessarily be able to accurately gauge the intended meaning? No, but isn't about you. Don't feel bad though, you get to bring your own subjective experience to the table and that has just as much weight as the composer's.
Did I say three concepts? I meant three and a half. Here's two point five.
Meaning and interesting sounds are measured on two separate axis, they need not conflict. However, that doesn't mean you necessarily need both of them either. Which is to say, you can forget meaning.
There's another horrible, horrible widespread idea that a song NEEDS TO HAVE MEANING. Why is that, exactly? Don't answer that. First of all, how would you even apply that criterion? Are you going to jump inside someone's mind to determine whether or not they actually bothered to invest any meaning into a song or if they were just paying the bills? Drawing a line between what does and does not qualify as music based on something that is absolutely impossible to judge externally is absolutely absurd and foolhardy. Don't do it.
Besides, what does meaning really bring to the table that is so special? We're already listening to and making music for the sake of cool sounds and whatever we get out of the experience is coming from our end anyways. Sure, it can be nice, but is it really all that necessary? Just enjoy the sounds and stop demanding to be force fed emotion, if you still have them it should come naturally.
As an example, feel free to listen to the As Seas Swallow album "Longing For Never." No, really, I won't stop you. I will say, however, that there are some songs on this album that are pure cool sounds-ism, some which have a concept or story behind them and some which I even wrote from the context of something personal. If you can honestly tell the difference between them and figure out which is which I'll eat a salad.
http://asseasswallow.bandcamp.com/album/longing-for-never
Third and final thing, I promise. Remember how we talked about how music is really a concept, not the sounds themselves? We're going back to that. Bear with me.
Side Note: I lied previously about the continuity, everything that follows is from about a month after I started writing this. I stopped because I wanted to think of the perfect example for this, and I did at lunch one day but then I forgot it and now I've had to think of a new one. It'll do.
Take a board game, yeah? Say, Fresco. You open the box, what's in there? A board, some cards, some tiles and some wooden cubes and other bits. Is that the game known as "Fresco"? Well, no. Those are just pieces. You have the understanding that it is a game, but only because someone has said "hey, this is a game and here's how it involves these widgets." (If you're one of the designers that someone is you, the idea doesn't change) Those pieces don't contain the concept of the game itself, they just facilitate your ability to perceive and interact with it.
Any given piece that "belongs" to a game may not even be consistently incorporated into it. For example, there are numerous cards and tiles included with Fresco that are only used if the players wish to add certain additional rules to the game. It's entirely possible to play an infinite number of games of Fresco and never use the Portrait cards, for example. In what way would they be related to the game then? If you decided to store a blank piece of paper in the box as well how would those two things be different in any functional way?
This also carries over to game components that belong to multiple games. The wooden cube is a staple of modern eurogames, much like the checker is a key component of countless abstract strategy games. Either of these things could be taken and used in an infinite number of games without ever changing itself, it's merely the application that changes. If one believes that game components somehow metaphysically contain the game they belong to this would be tricky, if one assumes they are merely a convenient representation it isn't.
Indeed, you don't even need physical components to play many games. Any perfect information game without randomization, like 1830 or Chess, would be fairly easy to play through as a conversation, or at least any difficulties would come from the inability of mere mortals to accurately remember the game state and communicate clearly with one another and not from any obstacles introduced by the game concept itself. Sure, the pieces are fantastically helpful, but they are ultimately just a way to see what is going on in our minds as the game progresses.
So music is like that.The sounds are the physical components and the music itself is just a concept. The sounds are our way of accessing that concept. Yeah, heavy.
Alright, enough of that for now. You may or may not agree with what just happened, the whole point was just for you to get a picture of where I'm coming from when I talk about music so that the following posts about my writing techniques won't be completely incomprehensible. Well, they might still be, but I tried.
